


took my leather off the shelf

by aerialiste



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - College/University, Angst, Heavy Angst, M/M, Minor Emori/John Murphy (The 100), Philosophy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-28
Updated: 2018-11-28
Packaged: 2019-08-29 12:32:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16744057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aerialiste/pseuds/aerialiste
Summary: “I just don’t get it," said Bellamy, shaking his head. "It’s not like you. None of this is like you.”My partner never walked out on me before,Marcus didn’t say.I never met a beautiful cockroach who actually wanted me.In which a professor of analytic philosophy and an undergraduate card sharp find something unexpected: each other.





	took my leather off the shelf

**Author's Note:**

> There is nothing here but a sinner and her sin; don't like, don't read. Also when I say angst, I'm not kidding. Turn back now. You have been warned. I want to blame Betts for all this but the truth is I did it to myself, and she helped.

> _But look again, sweet friend, and see whether you are not deceived about me. The mind begins to grow critical when the bodily eye fails, and it will be a long time before you get old._ [Socrates to Alcibiades, in Plato’s _Symposium]_

  


_I. no one’s picking up the phone_

In the end it had unravelled with an unsettling ease, which Marcus supposed he should have expected. Thelonious had been married twice before, after all, and as the bromide went, when they show you who they are the first time, believe them. (He thought maybe Oprah had said this, but it might have been Maya Angelou. Thelonious would have rolled his eyes, either way.)

Nothing about any of it had seemed completely real, starting with the evening that Thelonious had come home from work and said, in the serious baritone voice he only used for board meetings and commencement speeches, “I’ve been thinking, and there’s something you should know.” Marcus was still holding the spoon he’d just been using to stir dinner—a stew with lacinato kale, chicken sausage, and white beans, because it was cold that night, or cold for Arizona; and Theo wouldn’t remember to eat, most of the time, unless Marcus cooked. He’d just handed in his grades that day. He’d been thinking they might take a weekend, drive up to Flagstaff. Stay in their favorite haunted downtown hotel, sleep late, have croissants and lattes and comfortable familiar morning sex.

Instead Theo had left, and within a matter of weeks, their lives were back to being completely separate, almost as if they had never been together in the first place. If it weren’t for the thick dent in the carpet where their queen-sized bed had been, Marcus might have wondered if it had really happened. He didn’t bother to replace the bed, just slept on the couch, when he slept at all. The lack of sleep had probably gone a long way toward making everything feel so strange. His entire life had turned brittle as glass, pivoted at an angle, light refracting through it to show everything broken and wrong.

Parts of what came next were still missing, in Marcus’s mind. He remembered a surreal sunny morning meeting in the university credit union, splitting up their joint accounts—both of them, incredibly, cracking jokes with the clerk, still doing the dog-and-pony show, because Marcus was so used to it that he couldn’t stop. Having to be tested for STDs, he remembered that, vividly, amid the blur. Even in those moments of sudden crystalline focus, none of it had seemed as real as his life with Thelonious. Their dinners and long weekends, impromptu faculty parties and poetry readings in the ramshackle backyard palapa, which Theo had insisted on calling, grandly, a cabana. There was a hole in its roof, and roaches lived among the palmettos on either side, but it was part of the reason they’d bought the house. Marcus had strung it with multicolored Christmas lights and they would sit out there in the evenings, watching feral cats slink around the yard, toasting each other with condensation-wet bottles of cold Topo Chico. Theo always threw his bottle caps to one side as he talked animatedly about campus politics, aiming them onto a pile that had grown over the winter until it was now a rusty heap. Marcus guessed he’d have to deal with that at some point, if he ever dealt with anything, along with the coffee can full of Theo’s cigarette butts.

Nothing about any of it had been quite believable, not even the day he’d come home to find Thelonious’s cat Wells (named for Ida Barnett) miaowing plaintively in the hallway, and exactly half of everything gone. Because, before Theo had fled to Paris, like a coward, with his stupid younger girlfriend Alie, with her stupid French name and its stupid single L, he’d apparently come by the house with movers and collected all of his things, waiting for Marcus to go to campus to do it. Marcus guessed he’d put everything in storage, the better to walk around the City of Light with Alie all summer, unencumbered by objects, by reality, by their years together.

That day had maybe been the worst out of all of them, though he’d been completely numb at the time. With Wells still at his side, confused and vocalizing about it, Marcus walked through the house, inspected every room to see what was gone, a little shocked to feel nothing as he looked at the half-empty walk-in closet, the half-empty bathroom cabinets, the half-empty cupboards where their wine glasses had stood side by side. Worst of all, somehow, were the cleaned-out record album shelves and bookcases, the ones Marcus and his father had built by hand when they’d first moved in. All of Theo’s Black Arts Movement albums were gone, his Cecil Taylor and Sonny Rollins. Marcus’s Wittgenstein and Quine and Whitehead tipped over into the vacant spaces left by engineering and political theory textbooks, only a thin edge of dust left to show where they had been.

“I’m sorry,” Marcus told Wells, knowing his very presence was inadequate. He sat down on the carpet and stroked the scraggly, staticky fur along his back. They wound up lying on the floor together. Marcus didn’t bother to turn on lights as the house grew dark around them; he dozed occasionally, waking to see only the streetlight shining across the vacant room.

As if Wells had known he’d been left behind, he started refusing to eat, and slept most days curled up in Thelonious’s old desk chair, until one morning he threw up even water and Marcus took him to the vet. It turned out he had a particularly malignant form of feline oral sarcoma, and had only days to live, at most. (“It’s usually caused,” the vet said with enviable detachment, “when cats lick cigarette smoke from their fur—is anyone in your family a smoker?” “No,” said Marcus, still reeling from _family_.) Again he lost time; and then there was nothing left of Wells but a square black floral tin filled with cat ashes, and tiny silken chips of teeth and bone. Not knowing what else to do, Marcus took a cellphone photo of the urn, and sent it to Theo via Facebook Messenger. Then he sat at his desk for a long time, motionless, before deleting his entire Facebook account.

Every square inch of the house was silent agony, whichever way he looked; but the very concept of organizing himself to sell it was unthinkable. Out of a curiously mechanical indecision, he’d gone over to Clarke’s deserted apartment to stay a few days. She’d been wait-listed for a Senate internship before starting grad school, and her number had unexpectedly come up, so at the end of the semester she left for DC without much of a chance to pack properly. Marcus had promised Abby he would make sure the landlord got the keys back. The cable was still working, and for some reason Clarke had left her television behind, as well as a countertop covered in takeout menus.

All of this turned out to be fortunate when Marcus lost the better part of a week to food poisoning or a stomach virus, or maybe just post-breakup syndrome, and all five seasons of _Battlestar Galactica_. He lay slumped on Clarke’s discarded loveseat feeling like hammered death, and didn’t even feel ashamed when he cried over both the Adamas in the final episode. Theo probably would have pointed out how racist the ending was, and been critical of its overly romanticized spiritual underpinnings. Marcus was very slowly starting not to care what Theo would have thought.

At the last minute he realized that he’d have to be the one to clean Clarke’s apartment for the walk-through, and this spurred him into reluctant action. He felt a little nostalgic for it by then, its aggressively plain beige carpeting and bland Navajo white walls. He brought over his cleaning supplies, vacuumed up bobby pins and paperclips; turned off the fridge and wiped it out with baking soda; carefully spackled thumbtack holes in the doors. Late at night, he dragged a cardboard box full of Clarke’s left-behind oddments out to the dumpster by the back parking lot and threw them in, one at a time: chipped mason jars, plain glass florist’s vases scaled with lime, dead potted plants.

It was the last day of June, the night before he had to be out, and he was kneeling on the bathroom floor at two a.m. to scrub it, unthinkingly collecting stray q-tips and cotton balls smeared with cosmetics from where they had accumulated behind the toilet, when it occurred to him so suddenly he had to stop what he was doing and sit back on the hard tile floor: he should just take over the lease. Which is exactly what he did the next morning, giving Abby and Jacapo as references, because nobody needed to know, ever again, that he’d been fucked over by the university chancellor.

  


_II. guess it’s me and me_

After another week of Clarke’s scary loveseat, which had a spring poking out of it and scorch marks in its grotty brown tweed cover, Marcus gave up and hired a couple of undergrads to bring his furniture over to the new place. (He’d decided to let Theo deal with the house, when he came back; it wasn’t like Marcus needed the money.) At least his own sofa was long enough to accommodate his entire body, and he didn’t have to worry about diseases. He kept Clarke’s television, though, because it was bigger than his own. He gave his and Theo’s to one of the undergrads, and then signed up for cable as well, so he didn’t have to fall asleep watching home shopping channels, or infomercials.

When he dragged the old loveseat out to the dumpster, one awkward lurch at a time, having to tussle it up onto its end to get it through the narrow doorway, a young white guy with dark hair was sitting on the steps to the basement laundry room, drinking iced coffee, smoking, and reading a mass-market paperback. Marcus would have said hello, but he was busy wrestling with furniture; the young man didn’t look up from his book, much less offer to help.

When he turned to go back inside, Marcus couldn’t resist a peek at the familiar hot-pink cover: _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance._ _Oh god_ , he thought with a lurch of dismay, feeling a hundred years old, _college boys still read Robert Pirsig._ They probably also still listened, unironically, to Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers if not prog rock, or worse (Charles Mingus! Ornette Coleman! honestly Marcus never wanted to hear fucking free jazz again for as long as he lived). This guy probably smoked herbal cigarettes, and bored his girlfriends by pretending he could explain quantum entanglement. “I’m really into Zen right now,” Marcus imagined him saying earnestly to someone, dark hair slicked back, having completely missed that the entire book was about the pre-Socratics.

But then again, here he was, with his Ivy League doctorate in analytic philosophy, and decades of research _,_ his shelves full of contributor’s copies; and Theo had still left him. And he woke every morning alone, with his chest tight and filled with pain like a barrel brimming with rainwater.

To keep from going completely insane, he offered at the last minute to teach two summer sections of something called Introduction to Critical Thinking, a one-credit mandatory course for entering students who had tested below the something on the something something; honestly, he wasn’t sure why. The whole thing was miserably below his pay grade but it saved him from thinking about the articles he needed to peer-review, and the ones he needed to finish writing, and most importantly, Theo. His forty-eight students were unremarkable but cheerful, mostly clean-cut local kids, white Mormons and Catholic Hispanics, and he enjoyed horrifying them with phenomena illustrating the ineluctable perversity and depravity of human nature, such as the Stanford prison and Milgram experiments. They were, he thought, a little confused by him, but it hardly mattered. The main thing was that they got their one credit hour, and he got out of bed and got dressed for them.

He woke slowly in the mornings, unaccustomed to being asleep at all, and every time became aware of a bone-deep anguish, a jolt like a low vibration reverberating through his entire body as he swam back to consciousness. He would lie there for a while, trying to figure it out—something was very wrong, but what was it? Did he have the flu? Had there been a car accident? Eventually he would feel up to opening his eyes, and when he saw the white sheets, new and strange, and the morning sunlight falling across his old chest of drawers, one knob missing, a long crack in the wood at the bottom, he would remember: out of nowhere, after a decade together, Theo had left him. Remembering made the vague discomfort solidify even more, turn razor-edged and jagged, and he would hold as still as possible, breathe shallowly, to keep it from spilling over. _It doesn’t matter, because I have to teach_ , he made himself think, bewildered by how much it hurt but hauling himself to a sitting position, and then he would set into motion the terrible machinery of each day. _If you get to campus_ , he told himself grimly, _you can have coffee_ , and for some reason this simple enticement worked every time.

He finished the first six-week summer session, and signed up for a second.

He let his beard grow, thinking of Nebuchadnezzar. It seemed like the least he could do.

  


_III. and this little masochist is ready to confess_

Phoenix was locked in its usual horrifying July, with temperatures that made it seem more like the surface of the sun than any habitable planet. He wasn’t really eating, but it turned out the pre-packaged soup in the takeout section at Whole Foods was reasonably good, especially the chicken tortilla and the cream of potato, which he could eat cold—an important consideration in a summer climate so brutal that water came out of the tap hot enough to burn your hands, and the metal of your car keys always did. He bought an immersion blender off Amazon and made fruit and yogurt smoothies with it; in between those and the soup, he wasn’t in danger of starving, anyway, or becoming dehydrated. He noticed his t-shirts and jeans fit him differently, but that seemed like the least of his problems. His beard came in shot with gray, while his lengthening hair, which he mostly left alone, stayed dark. He ignored the mirror. It didn’t matter what he looked like, since he hadn’t been enough to make Theo want to stay, want to keep trying, or maybe try at all in the first place.

He was coming back from one of his rare grocery-store outings, so focused on getting everything into the fridge and freezer before the popsicles melted and the milk soured that he rounded the corner and almost walked straight into a couple arguing, before backing up into the stairwell to listen. When Marcus thought back on it later, he had no idea why he’d done that.

“Why would I believe you—why? You only think about yourself!” shouted a young woman, as she slung on a backpack. She shoved at her interlocutor, who was trying to follow her, with one black-gloved hand.

“It wasn’t like that, I told you. It was just the job—it’s the grift, you know how it is.”

“You know what, John Murphy? You pretend to be so indifferent to everything, but you’re a manipulative little _shit_ ,” hissed the girl, her face contorted in anger as she bent to lace up a pair of hiking boots. Despite the heat, she was wearing a ski cap shoved down over glossy brown hair.

The young man to whom she addressed these comments sighed, but he did look remarkably unbothered—it was, Marcus realized, the same guy he’d seen reading Pirsig on the steps. He stood in the doorway of what was apparently their apartment, watching her with blasé interest as she jerked various objects out of her backpack—a hairbrush, a pencil case, a phone charger—and threw them past him through the doorway, only ducking when a pair of bright orange earphones nearly hit him in the face.

“And this surprises you somehow? We’re professional _gamblers_ , Emori, I thought you might have noticed something by n—”

“Gamble with this, asshole: I took our stake.”

Suddenly the young man seemed to be paying more attention. “What are you talking about.”

“I transferred the money while you were busy _working_ your _mark_ , _John_ —and I closed the account, so don’t even bother trying to track it. Just go fuck her, and leave me out of it. That’s it. I’m out. I’m off the grift.” She spun to leave, and Marcus could see for the first time that the right side of her face was tattooed, a long wash of curving dark blue-black that looked vaguely familiar.

“Hang on—wait, fuck. Emori, just _wait!”_ the young man called, taking off down the hallway after her. Marcus stepped farther back into the recess next to the stairwell, aware he shouldn’t be eavesdropping but unable to flee now without being hideously conspicuous.

The young couple passed by, the girl sprinting easily and lightly, the guy at an already-defeated half-lope, neither noticing him in his poor hiding place (“Emori, don’t—for chrissake would you just _listen—_ ” “All you do is lie, John! I’ve had it! Fuck you—”). Marcus felt like an idiot, and had just slipped out of the alcove to hurry back to his own apartment before he was spotted, when the young man dropped out of a run, slow step by step, and finally turned back, sighing. Marcus froze, and they stood there staring at each other for a long tense moment.

The young man relaxed all at once, and laughed. “Caught the last part of that, huh? Thrilling stuff.”

Marcus toyed with lying, but it was a little too late for it, given that he was standing there with his arms full of reusable grocery bags, nowhere near his own door. “I’m very sorry,” he tried, but was unable to summon a friendly apologetic smile to go with the words. It was like his face had forgotten how.

“Forget it,” said the young man—John Murphy, apparently—with a graceless one-shouldered shrug. His frayed jeans hung dangerously low on his hips, held up by nothing, as far as Marcus could tell, grey t-shirt likewise stained and torn at the hem. He had several days’ growth of uneven stubble, and his dark hair flopped forward into his face. “It wasn’t even a very good stake.”

“She might come back,” Marcus offered, though personally he rather doubted it. “Sometimes they do.”

Murphy squinted at him. “And that would be why you’re living alone in Clarke’s old apartment.”

Marcus had no ready response to that, so he just repeated, “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, you said that. Want a drink?”

“Thanks, I should be—what?”

“A drink.” Murphy mimed opening a bottle with an opener. “Beverage. People put it in their mouths, swallow. Very refreshing. Popular with the kids these days.”

Marcus surprised himself by laughing aloud, a rough barking sort of sound. Murphy raised his eyebrows, clearly waiting for a reply.

“Oh, well—that would. Let me just,” he finished, gesturing with his head toward his own apartment.

“Sure,” Murphy drawled, looking both disbelieving and amused. “Just come on in. The lock doesn’t work anyway.” He kicked at something in the doorway, then stepped over it and went inside.

Marcus stood there in the hallway for a moment longer, uncertain, then thought, for the first time in months: _I wonder what I look like._

  


_IV. guess I thought I could never feel the things I feel_

By the time Marcus got his groceries put away and knocked tentatively at the still-open door, Murphy had opened a couple of beers and waved Marcus toward one, sweating on the kitchen counter. The floor was mostly covered with abused-looking laptops, monitors, arterial tangles of cords, and what Marcus was going to call, diplomatically, trash: empty pizza boxes, crumpled snack bags, neon-bright cans of energy drink, scrawled-upon and ripped-apart pieces of graph paper. An unframed whiteboard, of the kind you could buy by the yard at the hardware store, was propped up unevenly along the length of one wall and covered in the sort of math that was more letters than numbers—partial differentials, Marcus thought. He recognized the scene well enough from years spent cleaning up after Theo; whatever Murphy did for money, it was clearly more work than fun, and required long unmoving hours of repetitive mental activity.

Murphy shoved aside a half-full plastic trash can to make a path for Marcus, and then, almost as an afterthought, picked up an empty cup of ramen noodles and dropped it into the bin, on top of a tangle of, for some reason, coat hangers. “So are you, like, Clarke’s dad, or just dicking Abby,” he asked, dropping down onto the floor in a sprawl, and Marcus promptly coughed up his first mouthful of beer.

“Just a family friend,” he managed, but he caught a certain shuttered flicker in Murphy’s eyes and realized the kid was fucking with him. Subtly, but still. He felt a spark of something like irritation, a bright hot little pop inside, and it occurred to him that he hadn’t felt anything like it in weeks, maybe months. He took a pull off his beer and decided to bunt.

“What about you—sleeping with your parole officer?”

That startled a slow grin out of Murphy, and a cool reappraisal, starting at Marcus’s boots and meandering all the way up, finishing with his (presumably dishevelled) hair and beard. Marcus knew he’d lost weight and felt oddly conscious of the way his ratty black t-shirt (which might have been one of Bellamy’s, come to think of it) and battered khaki cargo pants drooped on him. Whatever. He straightened up, pushed his shoulders back. He had read the works of Heidegger, even the weird late essays. He didn’t need to take shit from some delinquent card shark with an apartment even emptier of furniture than Marcus’s own. It was a studio, with a futon mattress shoved into one corner, strewn with sleeping bags and pillows, and that was about it. Marcus half-sat on the window sill, and took another drink of beer, which was some kind of totally nondescript Trader Joe’s Hefeweißen.

“If I thought that’s what it would take, then yeah, I probably would,” Murphy allowed, and Marcus found he could respect that. “But it’s not illegal to fleece rich fuckwads who shouldn’t be playing poker online in the first place. I keep my court dates and pay my rent on time, that’s all they care about.”

“How long were you…in for?” Marcus asked. He suspected that probably wasn’t what real ex-cons said, but as his knowledge of criminal activity was largely restricted to having watched most of _The Wire_ with Theo _,_ he was drawing from a limited diction set. Murphy seemed too young for a life of crime, anyway. Maybe it had been some kind of mistake.

“Five-year sentence, but I only did three. Good behavior,” Murphy said, stretching out the last word like it was a joke. Maybe it was, to him.

Marcus tried to imagine spending three years of his life in a jail cell, and failed. The closest he could come was his library carrel during a year-long fellowship at Boston University, which had been made of black wire grating and had a deadbolt—but the lock was on the inside. Or had it been?

“Did you have books to read?” he heard himself asking, and winced at the stupidity of the question.

Murphy twisted to look up at him, and Marcus felt something in his chest give a funny sideways lurch. There were things going on in this conversation he didn’t understand, some kind of uninterpretable low background hum, and he wanted to retreat to his apartment and puzzle it apart, diagram it on paper until he could figure out the logical form of whatever was happening.

“When we weren’t making license plates, sure. I got my GED the first year, then did a couple years of Maricopa County courses online so I could transfer without having to go to community college.”

“You’re a philosophy major?”

“Minor. I’m majoring in econ. But it’s kinda creepy that you know that.”

“I saw you reading Pirsig,” he blurted, and Murphy smiled, eyes narrowing like Marcus had said something smart, and he felt an unexpected flush of satisfaction.

“It’s for an intro to ethics course,” Murphy said. Marcus made a face in spite of himself.

“You’re taking Pike.”

“The very same.” That drawl again, nasal and sharp, with no small quantity of vocal fry. Marcus should be finding it tiresome and juvenile. He wanted to finish his beer and leave. He took a quick pull, then another, wiping his palms off onto his pants legs. “I’ve seen you around the department. I just don’t really…do symbolic logic. No offense.”

“None taken,” said Marcus. “Though anyone who can do that”—he gestured at the whiteboard—“really wouldn’t have any trouble keeping up.”

“That’s work,” Murphy said with a shrug, folding his legs up beneath him with the easy compactness of someone who spends most of his life on the floor. “The whole point of minoring in philosophy is that it’s not my day job, it’s strictly for pleasure.”

The word jolted Marcus; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d enjoyed reading. He swallowed. “That must make Pike doubly frustrating.”

Murphy’s eyes were so deep-set that Marcus couldn’t tell what color they were; brown, maybe. “He’s not a _bad_ guy, but he does seem to have an unhealthy interest in Aquinas.”

Marcus laughed. It sounded strange in his ears. “Pike’s from Notre Dame. He still thinks birth control is immoral.”

“You don’t say. That probably explains his hate-boner for Nietzsche, too.” He pronounced the name correctly, and Marcus became conscious of a sudden need to be anywhere but there.

He finished his beer, that last swishy mouthful that always seemed to be mostly foam and saliva, and set the bottle onto the windowsill with an abrupt clank. “Well, I’d better get back to the salt mines,” he said, idiotically, as though he had been doing anything other than staring at the same set of notes all day, playing the same PJ Harvey album over and over, and getting exactly nowhere. _No I’ve missed him / no I’ve missed him._ Back to the salt mines, indeed. _Did I tell you you’re divine?_

On his way to the door, weaving a little, he noticed for the first time the brown laminate Ikea bookcases lining both sides of a hallway that presumably led to the bathroom: at least half-a-dozen to a wall. It wasn’t like him not to gravitate directly toward books upon entering an apartment. But he found it hard to be interested in them even now, with Murphy slouching there in the doorway, looking louche and unshowered and somehow appealingly derelict.

He stuck his hand out, awkward, and Murphy took it after a barely perceptible hesitation, eyes flickering with amusement. His fingers were rough, calloused.

“Thank you for the beer. It was nice to meet you.”

“You, too, Professor Kane,” said Murphy. “I apologize for the overly… _dramatic_ circumstances.” How was he making everything sound either sarcastic, or like an invitation—

“Please, just Marcus,” he said, hastily. “After all, we’re neighbors.”

“We certainly are,” agreed Murphy, leaning on the door frame, arms crossed over his chest; and as Marcus made his tipsy way back to his own apartment, he felt Murphy’s eyes between his shoulder blades, warm and bright and, unexpectedly, interested.

  


_V. sometimes I breathe you in & I know you know_

After that, though, their conversations were mostly confined to nods by the recycling bins, or over the dented top-loading washers in the basement, the ones that took ten quarters apiece and chewed holes in Marcus’s dress shirts. Once Murphy had asked him for a light, which Marcus didn’t have. At night, Marcus could see him sitting on the steps out by the dumpster, reading by the orange of the sodium streetlight, coal of his cigarette glowing meditatively in the dark.

The second summer session ended, and the mornings stopped feeling like an assault when the light came up over the Superstitions, shimmery purple in the east. Even though Marcus still struggled to consciousness, it was a little easier to breathe. He started going for long walks once the sun went down; the heat sapped from the concrete pavement through the soles of his shoes, and his bike keys burned his hands, but somehow it wasn’t as bad. When you lived in the valley long enough, one-twenty Fahrenheit was uncomfortable, but a hundred, hundred and five didn’t feel like anything. He sprouted lentils in a mason jar covered with a tea towel; did situps and pushups while watching PBS, and used Lexa’s chin-up bar until he could do almost a half-dozen of both kinds, overhand and underhand. When he got his fall course schedule (one section of intro to logic, one of advanced topics), he emailed both journals, asking for more time to finish the articles; returned all his library books, late one night, well after midnight, and left with nothing but a stack of oversized graphic novels and, on a whim, a volume of the Grene and Lattimore translations of Aeschylus, the one with _Prometheus Bound_.

He’d forgotten to bring a backpack for the books, which made getting home on his bike a challenge, even with panniers. He always did that, or tried to fit too many things into his basket at the grocery store; Theo used to make fun of him for it. And the librarian had even tactfully offered him a carrier bag, which he’d refused, for no good reason. Both hands full, Marcus tugged his front door key free of the lock and kicked it open just as he lost control of the stack of slippery paperbacks, and somehow wasn’t surprised to find John Murphy at his side helping him gather them up, even though it was well after one in the morning. Poker players kept odd hours, he supposed.

“Some pretty heavy reading there,” said Murphy dryly, handing him _Arkham Asylum_. He had a true Roman nose, pugilistic and broad between dark brows. It looked good on his face. Today he was wearing a white button-down opened over a white t-shirt, both so clean they had to have just come straight from the package. He had on dark tailored slacks, though his feet were bare and half-shoved into unlaced Converse, as though he’d been going out for a smoke, or coming back from one. Marcus accepted the book and tried to look calmer than he suddenly felt.

“It’s still summer,” he said, though as soon as the words left his mouth he realized classes started on Monday.

“Right,” Murphy said, after a beat. “Gather ye comics while ye may.”

“There’s Aeschylus too,” said Marcus.

“I noticed. Not exactly your wheelhouse, though, is it.”

“I took Greek in undergrad.” It sounded more defensive than he meant. In fact, he’d been terrible at Greek.

“St. John’s, right?”

Marcus blinked, and settled his stack of books more securely. “Yes, that’s right.”

“Department website,” said Murphy, shrugging. “You’re not exactly James Bond.”

“I don’t suppose I am,” said Marcus, though he wasn’t sure why John had bothered to look at all. “Are you registered for classes?”

“As of today,” said John, regarding him dispassionately. “Couldn’t get into your intro section. And I’m a senior anyway, so it’s all finishing my major this semester.”

Marcus couldn’t explain the relief that washed through him. “Congratulations.”

“Yeah, well, save that for when I’ve finished my thesis.”

“What’s it on?” Marcus asked. He wasn’t sure how long he needed to stand here talking, before he could decently go inside and retreat to his bed with all three compendia of _The Walking Dead_.

“Nothing you’d care about,” said John shortly. “Probability, and failures of relying on same. Binomial distribution means the house always wins.”

“Does it, though?”

John shoved his hands in both pockets, and looked up at him, face still but eyes faintly gleaming with something like interest, and Marcus wondered if he was seeing only what Murphy wanted him to see—that’s what it meant to have a poker face, surely. “Not when I’m playing. But for most players, yeah, it does. They get emotional, go on tilt. I don’t.”

“And what about—” he wanted to say Emoji; but that couldn’t be right.

“Emori?” John looked away and sniffed. His nose looked even better in profile. “It’s not the first time we’ve split up. She sort of comes and goes. She’s Inuit/Yupik; gets fed up with me and my bullshit sometimes, goes back to Alaska. I don’t blame her, I’m not the easiest asshole to live with. And she’s better than I am.”

“Better at poker?”

John laughed, but it was a clipped, bitter sound. “Better at being good.” Marcus would have missed it, had he not been looking straight at him, but a flash of something like sadness crossed his face. “Anyway, I don’t mean to keep you. From your, you know. Work. I just had a few minutes between interviews, so I came out to smoke.”

“That’s fine,” said Marcus, his voice softening a little, because he felt bad for the guy, unexpectedly. “I appreciate the help.” He paused. “Job interviews? At half-past one?”  
  
Murphy looked at him, face held immobile again. “Shift manager at Burger King,” he said, and Marcus wasn’t sure what his own face was doing, but Murphy cracked into a grin. “You should see yourself right now. I’m kidding—they just finished trading for the day in Hong Kong. I’m interviewing for quant jobs.”

“Of course, of course,” Marcus said, though he had no idea what that meant.

“Okay, well,” Murphy said, gesturing in the direction of his usual back-steps haunt, and Marcus realized they were standing closer together than was strictly necessary. John smelled clean, something woodsy, maybe citrus. His dark hair was damp and Marcus felt, out of nowhere, the urge to press his lips to it, feel the coolness against his mouth.

“Definitely,” he said, which made no sense.

“Very definitely,” said John, still grinning, and Marcus made it all the way inside before slumping back against the closed door, completely horrified at himself.

“He’s a undergraduate in your department. He’s literally half your age. He could literally be your son,” he said aloud, his own voice sounding weak and plaintive in the darkened room. He never used that word, but if anything called for _literally_ , it was this moment.

He’d never wanted children; he had too many students. He’d never, ever wanted one of his students, who were like some undesirable gender to him, like married people, or blood relatives. He’d hardly ever wanted anyone who didn’t want him back. But what he most wanted right now was to take off all of John Murphy’s clothes.

  


_VI. and sometimes you take a swim_

He couldn’t put it off any longer; it was well into September, and Marcus had to go into the office. If he’d had more students he would have had to do it sooner, but as it was, there was a small line outside his door when he finally showed up, mostly anxious first-years worried about their inability to wrap their heads around symbolic logic. He just hadn’t wanted to face his colleagues, their sympathetic faces, not even Sinclair, who’d started the semester by emailing him the usual links to journal articles he thought Marcus might find interesting but had recently upgraded his concern to texting him philosophy memes (“I can haz phallus?” a caption inquired of Judith Butler, which Marcus might have found more entertaining if he weren’t asking himself the same question).

“Well, well,” was all Jacapo said, though, raising an eyebrow at Marcus but not deviating from his course toward the department lounge’s new coffee machine. For years they’d just had two pots on a hotplate, like a diner, one labeled STRONG and the other VERY STRONG, but in the spring Abby had forced them to upgrade to something called a Nespresso, which no one but Jacapo knew how to operate. It made a hissing noise, and Sinclair turned to look at him, assessing. “So you aren’t dead yet.”

“I don’t want to go on the cart,” Marcus returned without thinking. He noticed his leather jacket hanging on the back of the lounge door’s coat rack, which was presumably where he’d left it last semester; he nodded at one particularly miserable-looking student.

That should have been Sinclair’s cue to follow through, something about going for a walk or feeling happy, but instead, to Marcus’s surprise, he held out the paper cup of—whatever it was, mostly milk foam, it looked like. Marcus took it gratefully.

“Gym?” Sinclair asked, head to one side, expression pointed; and Marcus sighed, then acquiesced.

“Fine. Dinner afterward, though,” he said, and showed the student into his office. There was a dead succulent on the desk, and he had to shove aside a stack of uncollected finals from spring—and then, quickly, before he had time to think about it, or the student could notice, knock a framed photograph of himself and Theo (hiking at Piestewa, Marcus sunburned and drunk-looking) into the trash.

When he finally emerged a half-dozen students later, he found Abby struggling to insert a thin foil pod into the machine’s orifice. Sinclair was nowhere to be seen.

“Don’t say a goddamn thing,” said Abby, and threw the pod into the trash. She rummaged around in a drawer and got a new one. “So where the hell have you been? You’ve missed three faculty council meetings.”

“Hi, Abby,” said Marcus. He looked over her shoulder; there was really only one way for the foil thing to fit into the slot, so he didn’t know what the problem was. “I was busy.”

“Busy,” Abby repeated, not sounding particularly convinced by this. The machine made its hissing sound again and they both watched a thin trickle fill her coffee mug. THE SENTENCE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THIS CUP IS FALSE, it read, in large blue letters. The department had given them out to graduating majors a few years ago. He wondered if he should steal one for Murphy.

“Yes, Abby, I was busy. I have two big conference papers coming up this fall.” This was true, unfortunately, though he did his best not to think about it, especially in the evenings, when he couldn’t work and instead mostly lay on his sofa reading _The Walking Dead_ until he fell asleep. His nightmares weren’t about zombies or conference papers, but were strange, and never repeated: he somehow forgot to take care of Wells, who withered into a dried-up little wisp of fur; or Marcus found out that Theo’s briefcase was full of knives, but he couldn’t let him know that he knew, or Theo would kill him.

Abby sat down on the lounge’s uncomfortable little mauve loveseat, all angles and elbows and diplomacy, and Marcus braced himself. He supposed he had it coming to him; you couldn’t just avoid your department chair for two whole months. He sat down opposite her, resigned.

“Did you know that at the last council meeting, Jaha motioned to eliminate several positions?”

He was busy trying to register that Theo was back from Paris, of course, and that Abby hadn’t called him _Thelonious,_ when what she’d said penetrated. “Wait, was this—was there a vote?”

Abby looked down at her coffee, eyes grave. “There was, and it passed. Marcus, we’re down a slot.”

“There was already a hiring freeze,” he said, unnecessarily.

“I want you,” she said, “to think very carefully about what might be best for your career, and whether you really want to stay in Tempe, after what’s happened.” Her eyes were kind, but deliberate, and steely. He knew that look very well. You didn’t work with Abby Griffin for fifteen years and not get to know it.

He nodded, and meant to say something in acknowledgement, like _I understand_ , or _I will_ , or even _actually I already have been_ , which he had; but nothing came out. If he wasn’t going to make full professor in the next couple of years, he’d be much better off looking for another position. Maybe a teaching college, he thought, ignoring the fact that he didn’t much like teaching. Maybe somewhere overseas. UCL, SOAS; he knew someone at Birkbeck, he’d email her before the conference—

“Looks like I get to kill two birds with one stone,” said a nasal voice behind him, and Marcus turned to see John Murphy, standing there with a handful of pink- and canary-colored forms.

“Mr. Murphy,” said Abby, switching from formal to even more formal, her official student voice. She’d be dean before the year was out, and probably chancellor before she was fifty, Marcus realized. She had some quality he’d always lacked, himself; practicality, or the will to power, or maybe she was just really well-organized. “Kane, this is one of my advisees—”

“Oh, Professor Kane and I have met,” Murphy interrupted, but took Marcus’s hand anyway, and held it a fraction of a second too long, palm hot against Marcus’s skin. “Actually, I was looking for him, but I was going to leave these for you to sign anyway, so it must be my lucky day.”

Abby stood to take the advising forms, all business, and while she and Murphy bent over them to discuss his difficulty in getting the economics department to agree to his thesis hours, Marcus had a chance to look at John covertly. He seemed unusually put-together; Marcus couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but maybe it was just the first time he’d ever seen Murphy wearing shoes. He had on a charcoal gray t-shirt, loose around the collar, and olive green pants, and badly needed a haircut.

“Great—thanks, Professor Griffin,” Murphy said, stuffing the forms into the front pocket of his backpack. “Professor Kane, do you have a minute?”

“Of course,” he said, automatically, and let John into his office before he had a chance to realize what he was doing. Murphy shut the door behind him and sat down without asking, legs splayed. He scanned Marcus’s books, eyes flickering over the titles, surreptitiously cataloguing them in a clinical yet avid manner Marcus knew well.

“Your plant’s dead,” Murphy said, not looking away from the bookshelves.

“Yes, I know. How can I help,” Marcus said, still on autopilot.

“You can come to our party,” said John, and slid over a flyer across the surface of Marcus’s desk. His nails were either bitten or cut very short, but the cuticles were neat, clean and pushed back.

The flyer depicted a realistic human heart in a puddle of blood, with the caption WAY TO RUIN A PERFECTLY GOOD HUMAN SACRIFICE, MOTHERFUCKERS. The party seemed to be on Halloween, at Monty and Harper’s apartment at the end of the hallway. Marcus knew Monty and Harper even less well than he knew Murphy, though they were apparently good friends of Clarke’s.

“I’m not much of a—”

“—party guy, yeah, I kind of got that. But look—Bellamy’s a mess since Clarke left, I just got dumped, and you don’t seem…particularly cheerful, let’s leave it at that." "How do you know Bellamy?" Murphy raised both eyebrows. “Um, everyone who knows Clarke knows Bell, he practically moved in last year. Anyway, we’re basically just gonna get hammered, which surely even you can handle. If the _Symposium_ is to be believed.”

“You’ve read the _Symposium_.”

“Not really my point, but yes.”

In undergrad, one of Marcus’s tutors had hosted them every spring for the annual _Symposium_ reading, which traditionally involved an implausible quantity of red wine and more than one truly regrettable hookup. At some point, Marcus decided, he was going to have to find out how a convicted felon wound up reading Plato for fun. Probably not at the party, though.

“I hate dancing.”

“How fun for you,” Murphy said, deadpan.

“I’m not going to wear a costume.”

“We’d be disappointed if you did.”

“Is Bellamy really doing that badly? Should I check on him?”

Murphy seemed about to say something, then visibly changed his mind. “He could use a swift kick in the ass, but, you know. We all handle heartbreak differently,” he said, instead. “I can’t really get started on the epic clusterfuck that is Bell and Clarke never getting their shit together, because I have an actual life to lead—just, we’re having a party, you’re welcome to drop in. Jasper’s making margaritas.”

“I suppose if I don’t come, you’ll all keep me awake making noise anyway.”

“That’s the spirit,” Murphy said. He left the flyer on Marcus’s desk and, when Marcus looked up to ask what time and if he should bring anything, there was just an open door, and Murphy’s backpack, as he walked out through the empty lounge.

Marcus picked up the dead plant, clay pot and all, and dropped it in the trash can with a crash. _We all handle heartbreak differently._ The glass of the photograph had cracked with the blow; potting soil and sand dribbled down their smiling faces in the picture, and he felt a vicious sense of satisfaction. He was about to see what else he could throw away, when Sinclair stuck his head in the doorway.

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah, just getting rid of some stuff.”

Sinclair eyed the mess in the trash can. “Was that John Murphy?”

“You know him?”

Sinclair met his eyes then, gaze steady and compassionate as always, but Marcus felt a little sick, like maybe Jacapo could see something he wasn’t ready for anyone else to know about, or even to know himself. “Why don’t we skip the gym,” Sinclair said, after a moment. “I could use a beer.”

Marcus checked his phone; somehow it was already well after five. “They say Wittgenstein was a beery swine.”

Sinclair laughed. “So I’ve heard. And we’re not even twice as sloshed as Schlegel.”

“No,” Marcus admitted. He picked up the stack of graded final exams and shoveled them into the recycling bin under his desk. “But hopefully we’re about to be.”

  


_VII. found your writing on my wall_

Before he’d even made it to the front door, hair combed back and a decent bottle of Malbec under his arm, Marcus knew he’d made a mistake. The music wasn’t just audible all the way down the hall, but he could feel it through the soles of his feet, and hear shrieks of laughter from inside, both high-pitched voices and baritone male shouting, then different music, though near enough to the first as to make no difference to his ear. He paused at the door and contemplated going back to his apartment, where a new season of that animated show about the alcoholic horse awaited him, and had just about made up his mind to turn around when the door opened and a young man with a thin, pleasant face and a shock of black hair stood there, car keys in his hand. Marcus was relieved to see he wasn’t wearing a costume, just a t-shirt reading, LAYER.  
  
“Hey there,” he said, and smiled. “You must be Marcus? I’m Monty Green, Bell said you were coming.”

“So nice to meet you,” said Marcus, taking his hand and feeling absurdly formal, even though he’d changed three times, dressing down more with every iteration, until he’d given up and just pulled on the same black t-shirt he seemed to wear everywhere lately, like a uniform.

(He’d looked for a long time at himself in the mirror, remembering how he’d been when he and Theo had first gotten together. What had happened to that man, hawk-nosed, tight-lipped, patrician, still muscular in black leather? He looked soft around the edges now, yet somehow at the same time oddly gaunt; rumpled, and slightly confused. He gave it another year before he had to start trimming hair out of his nose and ears. Forty was middle-aged, but still passably hot; fifty was just old.)

“I’m going out for more ice,” Monty said, “but please, go in on inside and make yourself—”

“—ice and fucking _Taco Bell!”_ shouted someone, and there was more laughter.

“Thank you,” said Marcus, and to his relief Bellamy appeared in the doorway behind Monty, broad-shouldered and reassuring.

“Kane,” he said, wrapping Marcus in one of his shameless hugs. He closed the door and gestured with his head toward the living room, where the music seemed to be loudest. “Party’s in there,” he said, “but come to the kitchen and I’ll introduce you.”

Marcus followed him, trying to work out Bellamy’s costume, which looked like a garage mechanic’s jumpsuit. “What are you wearing?”

“It’s my B&G uniform,” he said, apologetic, and now Marcus could see the place on his chest where Bellamy’s name would be embroidered, normally, but was covered up with a sticker that read, HELLO, MY NAME IS: GOD. “There’s a whole concept,” he said, and waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the living room. “Something to do with _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ , you’ll have to ask Echo. She’s dancing.”

Marcus didn’t think it relevant to admit that he’d never seen a single episode, so he just nodded in what he hoped was a comprehensive sort of way. Also Echo was beautiful and smart, but more than a little scary, with a grievous case of resting bitchface, and Marcus had no intention of talking to her at all if he could help it. He didn’t blame Bell for dating her, but he worried about it, nonetheless. Bellamy of all people, he thought, deserved someone with a heart as wide open as his own.

There were a dozen people packed into the narrow kitchen, sitting on countertops or standing on either side; none of them were Murphy, and Marcus felt unsettled by how much he’d wanted him to be there. He shook a few hands but wasn’t going to remember any names except Jasper’s, because he immediately handed Marcus a red plastic cup full to the brim with frozen margarita. “Secret ingredient,” he warned, winking, and Marcus didn’t ask what that might be, just took a gulp. It was good, not overly sweet, so maybe the secret ingredient was real lime juice. Jasper had a sweetly gamine face and shaved head, and wore a white shirt with three saucer-sized black dots pinned to it. Marcus had no idea what he was supposed to be. Punctuation? A piece of paper? Some kind of asymmetric ghost?

Bellamy was hugging a blonde woman who looked like she might be a few months pregnant. She smiled and hugged him back; she was dressed, for some reason, as bricks, wearing a red-brick-patterned dress, but also a pair of white feathery wings and a wobbly halo, and drinking something repugnantly healthy looking out of a mason jar, bright chlorophyll green. Bellamy kissed the top of her head and let her go. She smiled at Marcus. “This is Harper. Come on, let’s go outside,” he said to Marcus, “I want a joint.” Octavia wasn’t there, not yet anyway, or she would have already made her presence known. Murphy’s absence was gratingly palpable, an ache against his ribs, as if his whole body were trying to orient him to something that wasn’t there. He ignored it.

There was no one on the balcony, so they each took chairs, skimpy rattan things that rattled against the concrete. Marcus sat down on his cautiously, and asked how things were going. Bellamy reached behind them to close the sliding glass door, so that the noise of the party muted to a dull thump.

“It’s been worse, that’s for sure,” said Bell, after a pause. He reached into the pocket of his coveralls for a cigarette tin and started rolling. “Night school is kicking my ass, but then we knew that.”

They’d had this conversation before, more than once. Marcus had tried to get Bellamy to take out a loan, to borrow from him and Theo, anything so he wouldn’t be working full-time during the day for Buildings and Grounds while trying to finish his MEd in academic enrichment (specifically American history) at night. But Bellamy had insisted: he had to remain a full-time staff member of the university to get the family discount for Octavia, who’d just started her sophomore year. Theo and Kane even had a long argument about adopting her (Marcus didn’t see why not; Thelonious was outraged by the mere suggestion) so they could give her their benefits—an argument about which Marcus had never told Bellamy, nor would he mention it now, given that it was an impossibility. He wished he’d done things differently when Bellamy and O were both still teenagers. He wished he’d done a lot of things differently.

“O doing okay?”

“Are you kidding? She’s decided to double-major, plus she’s doing fencing tournaments every weekend, probably make it all the way to nationals this year. She’s eating it alive.”

“Well, she is a Blake,” said Marcus. Bellamy didn’t smile, but he didn’t need to; Marcus could see the pride radiating off him. He lit his joint and took a careful drag, holding the roach by its very ends, then offered it to Marcus, who shook his head and indicated his margarita. “I’m all set.”

“Oh come on, Kane. You look like shit, just take it.”

“How flattering,” said Marcus, but he accepted the roach and sucked in a lungful anyway. His eyes watered; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten stoned. He exhaled, chest burning, then took another hit before handing it back. “What about you, though? Are you getting enough sleep?”

Bellamy pushed a hand through his curls, a gesture Marcus had seen him make since he was a little kid, with the same frown then as now. “I’m fine,” he said, but he sounded tired. “I miss Clarke, I guess. Talking to her, hanging out after work. Having someone to help me figure out money stuff, stuff with O. I just—I feel less alone when she’s around.” _Oh my god,_ Marcus thought, with a sinking sensation, _Murphy was right, he really is in love with her._ He felt doubly terrible for having left Bellamy unattended the last several weeks; his own breakup was hardly an excuse, since it hadn’t been messy in the least. On the contrary, it had been over in almost a matter of hours, with a nearly surgical degree of cauterization.

“You haven’t even been to my new place,” he said, after a moment. “Why don’t you come over next weekend? We’ll get pizza, watch _Doctor Who.”_

Bellamy’s face brightened. “There’s a new doctor, too.”

“There always is,” Marcus agreed. “That’s the beauty of it.”

“Thank you, next,” Bell said, and laughed, so Marcus laughed too, though he didn’t know why.

There was a burst of noise and light from the living room, and Marcus turned around to see, unmistakably, O’s entrance. She was wearing an outfit he could only have described as _kinky gladiator:_ tight black leather armor, thigh-high boots, red face paint dripping down both cheekbones. Her long dark hair hung loose, a small entourage in her wake. He and Bellamy stared together.

“Did you know your sister was, in actual fact, a Visigoth?”

“I mean, didn’t we always sort of suspect that?” Bellamy put out the joint in an ashtray. “I regret Mom letting me name her more with every day. Let’s go inside, I need to see this up close.”

The party was in full swing as they stepped back into the apartment, purple and orange lights hanging around the room, all the furniture pushed back against the walls, and everyone jostling and laughing and, sort of, dancing, the way that American kids pretended to. He still didn’t see Echo. A ridiculously lovely young woman with a high ponytail and headphones was apparently in charge of the music, bouncing back and forth between laptops, huge smile on her face. She seemed to be dressed as the Bionic Woman, or maybe Robocop; anyway she had a brace framing one leg, black boots, and some kind of long-sleeved t-shirt with fake metal plates down one arm. Another girl with a thick mane of hair and dark brows, wearing a flower crown and a long hippie-looking dress, came up behind her and said something; the DJ turned around, still smiling, and they kissed enthusiastically before the DJ turned back to her music, her girlfriend behind her holding on, chin hooked over one shoulder. Maybe the girlfriend was supposed to be Janis Joplin? Kane had no idea.

Most people were shuffling side to side, but Jasper and Monty were spinning in a furious circle, hands held tightly against centrifugal force, laughing. Marcus couldn’t remember the last time he’d been dancing; maybe that nightclub in Pigalle, but Theo had been mad about something, and was being stubborn about it—or maybe Marcus was the one who was mad, he couldn’t remember, only that they weren’t getting along, except for a single fluorescent moment in a unisex bathroom doing bumps off the backs of each other’s hands. He waved to Octavia, who nodded back imperiously, obviously staying in character, and wandered into the kitchen for another margarita. He didn’t know anyone there, and they all conspicuously ignored him, old enough to be everyone’s dad, so he threw back another drink, melted now and going down much more easily, before filling up a third.

When he came back out, Bellamy was slow-dancing with a tall girl who wasn’t Echo, his coveralls unzipped to the waist, his hands on her hips. The girl, in a tight red satin dress, had her arms around his neck, their foreheads tilted together, bodies swaying. Marcus just had time to think that maybe Bellamy wasn’t so much pining for Clarke after all, when the couple dipped toward him a little, and he could see the angle of jawbone, the sweep of dark hair as the girl looked up into Bell's face and laughed, and he registered with a physical shock like a wash of cold water that it was _Murphy,_ who’d been there all along; and Marcus just hadn’t noticed, because he hadn’t been looking in the right place, or maybe looking at all.

  


_VIII. if my heart’s soaking wet_

When Marcus woke up the next day, he didn’t know exactly where he was, but a naked girl lay curled asleep on the floor nearby, wrapped up in what looked a lot like a feather boa, rainbow-colored. He seemed to be naked as well, on a bare futon, holding a pair of boxers clutched in one hand. He closed his eyes and waited, and after a minute it mostly came back to him: Monty and Harper’s party; getting stoned with Bellamy; Jasper’s laced margaritas; and—oh god—and John Murphy. On whose futon he was lying, without any clothes, with a sleeping bag half over him, and another one wadded up like a pillow under his head. His eyes felt grainy, so he closed them again.

After a few minutes more, he sat up and put on the boxers, which weren’t his or, as best he could tell, Murphy’s either, but they fit well enough. He had no idea where his actual clothes were; Murphy and his guyliner and slinky dress were nowhere to be seen. After some searching, Marcus found a t-shirt on the floor that for some reason said MAKE ALGAE, NOT WAR, and put it on, then draped one of the sleeping bags over the naked girl, who didn’t wake up when he left.

Marcus hadn’t done the walk of shame since grad school; fortunately, he only had to go one door down. He stripped again in his bathroom and showered for a long time, brushing his teeth, washing his hair twice, angry at himself for having to lean against the tile in the middle and jerk off to the memory of Murphy sliding down to his knees while looking up at him. How do you get through twenty-five years of adjunct, assistant, and associate professor, only to blow it now, he thought, furious, and came, weakly, with a choked-off sound, remembering John’s hollowed cheeks and darkly malicious eyes.

“We can’t do this, you’re a student,” he’d panted at some point, mouth pressed against Murphy’s sweat-drenched hairline, his dick so hard he could feel it in his molars, all the way at the back of his tongue. Murphy had just huffed a laugh and said, in that nasal, grating voice, “Maybe, but I’m not _your_ student,” before sucking him off so assiduously Marcus had practically seen the northern lights when he came, mostly on John’s throat and chest, shaking with how good it was. “Rub it into me,” Murphy said immediately, voice still raspy. “Jerk me off with it, I want you to make me come,” and Marcus had nearly lost it again, aftershocks ripping through him, before he’d done exactly that.

It had taken a long time, and a lot of protracted making out on the floor, before they were able to pull apart long enough to leave separately. When Marcus finally cracked open the guest bathroom door, the hallway was empty, but the party was still bumping in the living room, some kind of hip-hop song with a male voice which adjured everyone, repeatedly, to bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce. He could hear Octavia chanting along as he made his way as subtly as possible to the door, zipping up his fly and hoping he didn’t have makeup on his face. By some miracle, he didn’t run into anyone, not even in the now-populated hallway which led to Murphy’s apartment, where John was waiting to pull him inside so they could do it all over again, only horizontal, aiming in the dark for Murphy’s futon and settling for half-on, half-off. This time when Murphy went down on him Marcus didn’t protest, just knotted his fingers into John’s hair and held on, and was pathetically, hopelessly loud.

He still wasn’t sure what had gone wrong. Everything had been fine, and then it all went pear-shaped sometime around his fourth and final margarita. The dancing had increased in intensity, but a half-dozen of them were back to standing around the kitchen talking (or yelling, more accurately, over the music and the roar of ice in Jasper’s blender). Harper and Monty half-heartedly cleared away paper plates and other party detritus, but mostly seemed to be forcing their guests to drink water. Echo had surfaced; she was wearing chain mail and a helmet, and wouldn’t look Marcus in the eye, which made him wonder if she knew something about their earlier conversation, or about Clarke. He and Bellamy had surreptitiously done shots in the pantry, by silent agreement; neither of them were exactly extroverted. Now he felt comfortably detached, didn’t care that he was older than God, and had even had an interesting, albeit shouted, conversation with the DJ, whose name was Raven. She’d turned out to be one of Sinclair’s advisees, because Kane’s whole life was lousy with philosophy and he couldn’t get away from the department for so much as a single night. Even so, reality had a nice shiny blur over it, a soft glaze which made it slightly more bearable than usual. Possibly he should be getting drunk more often. In the living room, over a dirty bass line, a disgusted-sounding baritone admitted that he kept crawling back to you. Marcus zoned out.

Murphy had been ferrying used cups and empty beer bottles to Harper; he kept walking back and forth past Marcus, talking to someone else, but occasionally brushing an arm or hip against him for absolutely no necessary reason. Marcus couldn’t fathom why he was doing this. At some point, he’d hopped up to sit on the kitchen counter, tucked between Jasper and a girl with curly hair whose name Marcus hadn’t caught. The skirt of his dress had ridden up a little; he was wearing black fishnets, and hadn’t bothered to shave his legs. He and Jasper were handed a one-hitter back and forth, and Jasper couldn’t stop laughing. There was a pause in the music, and a cry of protest went up from the living room.

“That’s because your costume is terrible, like you,” Murphy told Jasper, and shoved at one of his black dots.

“At least I made one! What the fuck are you supposed to be?”

“I’m _pretty,”_ said Murphy. He reached across Jasper’s lap to accept the narrow pipe between thumb and finger, refill it from a ziploc bag, and take a delicate hit, lashes dark against his cheekbones. The flame from the lighter reflected off his lip gloss, a clear cherry red. Marcus couldn’t argue with his assertion.

“No, you’re just lazy,” retorted Jasper, “and it was easier to borrow Harper’s clothes.”

Murphy coughed, and his eyes lit on Marcus, who instinctively drew back. “If you want to pick on someone, what about the one truly uncostumed person,” he drawled, and tipped his head toward Marcus. He had thick black eyeliner smudged around his lower lids, and he looked sooty and sloe-eyed and unfairly edible. Marcus felt something like alarm.

“You said I didn’t have to wear a costume,” he protested.

“I didn’t say we wouldn’t mock you for it—I thought you taught logic. O, tell this man his fate.”

“Anyone without a costume,” Octavia said, eyes glittering unnaturally, “will be banished.”

Banishment didn’t sound so bad. “Okay,” said Marcus uncertainly.

Behind her, Monty had frozen in mid-movement, one hand still holding the garbage bag into which he’d been dropping trash; Harper was clinging to him, fondling the back of his neck and giggling. “Jasper,” he said, and his voice sounded strange, “what…what exactly was in those margaritas?”

“Nothing!” Jasper yelped, but too quickly; and then there was a brief struggle, until a now-hysterical Jasper, held down by Bellamy and ruthlessly tickled, finally admitted to the remaining party members that he might have, _might have_ , put something in that last batch—“just a little MDMA! it wasn’t even a lot! honestly, it was probably cut with a bunch of other stuff”—and amidst their collective groans and raised outraged voices, Octavia’s rang out: “Bring him to me.” Marcus honestly didn’t want to see whatever she was going to do to him, so he put down his cup and started edging for the door. Banishment it was, then. Retrieving the Malbec was probably a lost cause, since he already couldn’t feel his legs below the thigh. But maybe he could make it back to his place before the orgy started. Arizona State was a conservative university; he didn’t want to get fired if he could help it.

“Not so fast,” said a voice in his ear, and he stumbled, caught off guard, and wound up lurching to the left, into what turned out to be Monty and Harper’s guest bathroom. Murphy let go of Marcus’s shirt and smoothed down the wrinkles, leaving his palms resting there against his back, warm through the fabric. Marcus swallowed. “Surely you weren’t about to leave without saying goodbye to the person who invited you,” Murphy said, and shut the bathroom door.

This was bad. Marcus moved backward until he encountered a towel rack, and stopped. “I think I’m impaired,” he said, voice unsteady, and that was another bad thing. He was a bad person.

But Murphy just smiled, slowly, and said, “We’ll have to make sure to keep you that way, then,” and slid his hands around to the back of Marcus’s head. He licked his lips and looked up into Marcus’s face, studying it. “Not to insult your intelligence, but you’re probably just impaired enough to stop you from overthinking every goddamn thing.” Marcus closed his eyes to shut out John’s face, the softly glowing cupid’s bow of his upper lip, his tilted dark eyes. No. Absolutely not.

Then Murphy leaned up to kiss him, and everything had gone hallucinatory, and a little feral.

From the first press of John’s mouth against his, his knees had given out, so he let himself be crushed up against the wall, the towel rack gouging him uncomfortably between the shoulder blades. The matching set of monogrammed lavender bath and hand towels wound up on the floor, and they headed that way as well, panting and grabbing at each other’s clothing, mouths clinging. Murphy dropped to his knees and looked up at him through his mascara, his mouth falling open, and Marcus tried to hold himself up but his head spun and he slipped against the wall on his way down. He must have hit the light switch with his elbow, because the overhead bulb went out. He tried to reach up for it, but—“Fuck it, just leave it off,” Murphy breathed into his mouth and then reached for the waist of his pants, and so everything stayed dark, perfectly dark, velvet-soft vantablack darkness, and for once he didn’t even have to close his eyes to block out how much it all still hurt.

  


_IX. boy your boots can leave a mess_

Marcus wasn’t getting anywhere on either of his woefully overdue journal articles. He’d make coffee in the very early morning, like he had for years, but instead of writing would just wind up sitting there at the breakfast counter, slumped on one of Clarke’s old barstools, staring blankly into space. This morning was particularly bad. He’d already gone at least twice through the long bitter list of things he wished he’d said to Theo that night, the night when he’d first found out about Alie, and had started on a third run-through of the litany when a sharp rap at the door startled him enough to make him jostle his empty coffee cup with his elbow. It rattled against the countertop, and he looked at his phone and swore. It was almost noon, and he’d done nothing.

When he opened the door, he should have been surprised to see Murphy slouched there, but wasn’t. He waited out the initial jolt of lust (sharp cheekbones, hooded eyes, dip at the base of his throat, fine dusting of hair on his forearms) and the following dull thud of resignation ( _you can’t, you don’t get to, it’s not for you_ ), and crossed his arms over his chest. “Yes?”

“Thought you’d never ask,” Murphy said, and just like that was inside his apartment, hips swaying a little in those jeans with the frayed hems. Marcus followed him, trying to summon irritation.

“You don’t call, you don’t write,” Murphy went on, sliding onto the barstool Marcus had just vacated. Marcus refrained from pointing out that it had been less than forty-eight hours, and anyway he didn’t have John’s phone number. By this point, though, Murphy had apparently moved on, because he held up a scuffed hardback copy of Alisdair MacIntyre that Marcus had been pretending to read. “Aristotle, right?”

Marcus snapped it out of his hand and back down onto the counter, a little startled to hear himself sound as frustrated as he felt, his voice chilly and crisp. “If you really came over to discuss philosophy I’m afraid it’ll have to wait, I’m working.”

Murphy eyed the blank legal pad. “Yeah, I can see that.”

“Logic requires concentration.”

John put up both palms in mock surrender. “Fine, I get it. Guess someone’s not feeling tripartite this morning.”

_Goddammit_. Kane turned his face, but not fast enough, and Murphy laughed, sounding entirely too smug about it. “I'm twenty-seven, not stupid, remember?”

Marcus kept his back turned, and closed his eyes. Oh, he remembered, alright. And that answered another question: he’d thought Murphy might be closer to thirty than twenty, but like all faculty, he’d lost the ability to gauge young people’s ages. They all looked vaguely eighteen, eternally, because as Sinclair pointed out, the first-years stayed the same age every year, while they got older. And half Marcus’s age was twenty-six, add seven—it didn’t matter; John was clearly too young, even if he were thirty, and Marcus didn’t need an arbitrary piece of arithmetic to tell him this.

In a weird way, all of this was yet another reason to be mad at Theo. If Thelonious hadn’t left him for Alie, he wouldn’t be having to stand here in his own living room while John taunted him with his presence, with things he couldn’t have and wasn’t even supposed to know existed at all. He kept having flashbacks, and one asserted itself right at that moment, inconveniently, with Murphy breathing and moving not three feet away: John’s fingers cold against his as Marcus fumbled them out of the way to unbutton his own jeans, and Murphy laughing a quite different laugh, one a little breathless, a little shy, and a lot like one that Marcus wanted to hear again. He had to stop this, now.

He turned around wearing his best frighten-the-undergrads glare. “If you were going to barge in, you could have at least brought my clothes.”

“I’m holding them hostage,” Murphy said, failing to be terrified.

Marcus stared at him. “For—for money?”

“No,” said Murphy. “I don’t need money. Although maybe you do. If I’m being completely honest, that t-shirt deserves a mercy killing.”

_You didn’t seem to mind it the other night_ , Marcus didn’t say. Maybe he had, actually; once they got back to Murphy’s place it had been the first piece of clothing to go, skimmed over his head by John, who’d then raked fingers through Marcus’s chest hair, apparently not caring that it was mostly gray, and sucked Marcus’s fingers into his mouth, biting and licking them as he humped his thigh. He wasn’t thinking about that, he wasn’t going to get turned on—

Murphy was frowning at him. “You do realize I still have your wallet, right? Have you even left your apartment since the party?” He pulled it from his back pocket with two fingers, and tossed it lightly onto the counter. Something about the gesture made Marcus think, _pickpocket_. He forced himself not to reach for it.

“Thanks.”

“No problem. He’s not that good-looking, by the way.”

_Shit_. “You shouldn’t have—”

“—what, looked? Have you met me? Anyway, _you_ shouldn’t still be carrying around his picture. He’s the university chancellor, not St. Christopher. So I helped out with that. Thank me later.”

Marcus froze, then flipped open the billfold. Sure enough, Theo’s picture was gone, and in its place was a reward card for a frozen yogurt place down on Mill Avenue. It was, Marcus noted, nearly full.

Murphy watched all this without expression, eyes steady on Marcus’s face. “If you’re not busy—I mean, with all the sitting here alone, probably in the dark, feeling sorry for yourself—there’s a new flavor tonight. I think it’s birthday cake. Luna works there, she gives us free gummy bears.”

He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t. “John, I’m sure you mean well, but—”

“Uh-oh, it’s the _first_ name. Am I in trouble, Dad.”

“Don’t call me that,” said Marcus, from between his teeth.  
  
“Why, not a kink?” Murphy said, sliding off his barstool and toward Marcus, backing him toward the counter. “Absolutely sure about that?”

“Murphy,” he got out, feeling sweat spring up on his forehead. “This really isn’t a good—”

“A good idea? You thought it was a _great_ idea at the party. Or do you want to blame that on Jasper.”

“I’m not _blaming_ , I just—”

“Because I’m pretty sure you were checking out my ass well before the margaritas. As in, a few weeks before. Which is fine, by the way, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

John’s eyes, it turned out, were actually a very pale blue in direct light, and when seen close up. Marcus turned his face away as Murphy reached up to curl a hand around the back of his neck, thumb brushing at the edge where his beard began. He felt his pulse thumping against the skin of John’s hand.

“You know, there’s this saying they have in AA. _Get off the cross, we could use the wood_.”

Marcus swallowed, with difficulty, and kept his face averted. The vertical blinds on the sliding-glass door needed to be dusted. “Are you an alcoholic as well as a gambler?”

John’s other hand found Marcus’s belt loop, and his fingers latched onto it. “No, but in prison twelve-step meetings are about the most fun you can have that doesn’t involve dropping the soap.” He tugged Marcus’s hips closer. “Sorry, that was inappropriate. Rape jokes, always a crowd-pleaser. Look, are you going to keep staring out the door, because I could go stand over there.”

“John,” Marcus said again, “I really don’t—”

“You know what, though? Actually, you do,” said Murphy, and leaned up to press his lips against the side of Marcus’s neck. “I think you do, and you just don’t know what to do about it. But I do.”

He shook his head, dizzy, but turned his head instinctively toward the soft pressure of lips. Murphy smiled against the skin, and pulled back a little, and he was right; he did know what to do.

God, it had been so long since he’d kissed someone; since he’d _been_ kissed, not like this. John was a couple of inches shorter but he had both hands tangled in Marcus’s hair and his mouth was pushy and warm and insistent and Marcus just let him in, arms full of John Murphy for a long uncomplicated moment, sun slanting across their faces, until something liquid and intangible shifted and Marcus pressed back, took Murphy’s face in both his hands; turned them around so Murphy had his back against the counter and Marcus held him there, kissing him thoroughly, attentively, looking for something, but he wasn’t sure what. Murphy’s mouth was lush and wet, and Marcus couldn’t have stopped kissing him if the entire board of trustees had burst through the door with pitchforks and torches. Eventually Murphy pulled back to drag in a shaky breath before muttering, “I fucking _knew_ it,” and he wound both arms around Marcus’s neck, and hauled him in again.

Somehow one of Marcus’s hands moved down to the collar of John’s t-shirt, and pushed past its edge to find soft skin, which led to a strange chain reaction: Murphy shivered at the touch, so he had to scrape with his fingernails, which made Murphy inhale sharply through his nostrils. Marcus rocked his pelvis forward at the sound, and then one of John’s knees slid up until he wrapped his leg around Marcus’s hip; which is when things went from simple and mindlessly tactile to incendiary, and they were kissing blindly and Marcus was shoving him back against the counter. The coffee mug rolled away and went—somewhere, he didn’t care where; a stack of books fell over, knocked to one side by Murphy’s hand as he flailed for balance, palm skidding on the formica.

“Fuck yes,” breathed Murphy, twisting his head back so Marcus could bite a kiss into the side of his throat, “It’s been almost _two days,_ the fuck were you waiting for, another party invitation—”

“Do you ever stop talking,” Marcus said, and settled Murphy’s leg more firmly around his hips before backing up until he hit the dining table. Murphy shifted to straddle him so he could grind down against Marcus’s erection. “Just—oh god, that. Can you—”

“Do you ever stop,” Marcus said, and settled Murphy’s leg more firmly around his hips before backing up until he hit the dining table. A complicated wordless ballet ensued, as they kissed; Murphy unwound himself long enough for Marcus to sit on the edge of the table, then shifted and crawled up onto the table’s surface to straddle him, knees against wood, to grind down against Marcus’s erection. He broke the kiss. “Just—oh god, that. Can we, you—”

“Already on it,” said Murphy, pulling off his own shirt by the collar. “Come here.”

Marcus couldn’t assemble words. “Oh god,” he said, again, helpless, his mouth against the silky warm skin of John’s chest, fingers spread against his ribcage. “You’re so—”

“Incredibly hot, I know,” said John, but the sarcasm was dissolving in something more raw, something darker and needier, and when Marcus bit down on a nipple, Murphy’s breath caught in his throat, and Marcus could feel his cock jerk through two layers of fabric. “Yeah, that—that works.”

“Good,” said Marcus, and did it again.

“Shit,” Murphy gasped, “Okay, you win.”

“I didn’t know it was a competition,” Marcus said. In some corner of his mind he knew what to do and it didn’t involve the dining table, which had been his mother’s and was fairly solid and sturdy, she’d kneaded loaves of bread there, but all the same—he slid his arms beneath John’s ass and stood up in the same movement, or tried to, but overbalanced and nearly fell. Murphy kicked free and stood up on his own, trying to unbutton Marcus’s shirt and tug him somewhere at the same time.

“God, you’re a disaster. Sofa,” said John, and hauled him toward it, as Marcus lost all patience with his shirt and just pulled it over his head so they would lose a minimum of time for kissing. They didn’t make it to the sofa, but it turned out the floor was fine. The other time had been in the dark, and he hadn’t been able to see, and just to touch him was still amazing, to run his palms over hot satiny skin, over dense muscle, with Murphy making muted little open-mouthed sounds that went straight to the base of his spine. But he could see him, now, too; and you wouldn’t know it, from the way he held himself, from the way he threw shade and misdirection, and radiated hostility, but John Murphy was indecently beautiful, with the easy loose grace of the young, all generous male curves and lickable edges. Marcus tried to make up for how guilty he felt by mouthing down the sparse line of dark hair down the center of his stomach, sucking kisses into the skin. Murphy’s jeans and boxers slid off easily over his hips, and Marcus scented him, sharply clean and earthy, nipping at the base of his dick, angling for more of those soft cries, and being rewarded by them.

“Stop _teasing,_ ” groaned Murphy, and probably would have shoved his head down, but Marcus remembered what it was like to be that impatient, that urgent, and he licked his lips and took him down so far he gagged and coughed immediately, unprepared. “Jesus, Kane, I didn’t mean _that_ —”

“Don’t move,” said Marcus, and gripped him by both hip bones. Murphy’s legs strained against his jeans, confined, and Marcus worked them down lower until he could shove an arm in between his thighs and prop himself up against the carpet, a rough scrape against his elbow. He licked all around the shaft, letting saliva drip down, sucking and stroking him until John was wet and mewling, hips moving abortively against Marcus’s grasp, and this time when he opened his lips over the head of John’s cock and slid his tongue down, it went easily, and Marcus moaned, mouth full.

Distantly he heard the back of John’s head hit the floor with a thud. His thighs trembled, and Marcus pressed down as best he could with one forearm, palm wrapped around the base of John’s cock, trying to hold him still as he swallowed, sucked harder, moved his head up and down, sweat breaking out on the back of his neck. “Oh god, please don’t stop _,_ ” said Murphy, strangled, and Marcus wondered who would get him like this and then stop, but he obeyed, right up until the instant when a shudder rippled through John’s body and Marcus thought, _no, I’m not done._

He pulled off, but carefully, soothing the underside with his tongue, and Murphy let out a frustrated shout they could probably hear downstairs, and slapped the floor hard with one palm.

“Hush,” said Marcus, moving his hand down to caress the compact warmth of John’s balls, skin puckered and drawn up tight against his fingers. He worked his way back up John’s body with his tongue, getting his own pants most of the way off and a knee in between John’s, until finally he had both hands in John’s hair and they were kissing again, and Murphy laughed against his mouth.

“You’re a selfish asshole,” he said, and turned his head to bite the inside of Marcus’s wrist. “Are you going to fuck me or just torture me?”

Marcus inhaled sharply, felt a spill of wetness leave him, and used it to thrust against John’s stomach, again, and once again, unable not to move. He wanted to hold John’s head down, both hands fisted in his slippery long hair, and come all over his face. “Not on the floor.”

“You’re not going to torture me on the floor? That’s a relief, I wasn’t sure if you—”

Marcus shut him up with another kiss, this one long and complicated and filled with a kind of dark anger he wasn’t sure he understood, but it had something to do with the fact that neither of them would let anyone take care of them, and maybe for the next hour they would take care of each other. “Come to bed,” he said, and this time they both got their pants all the way off before they fell into the bedroom.

Without prompting, John pulled away to crawl up the mattress, where he stayed on his hands and knees, waiting, muscles tense, and Marcus felt a pang of misgiving. “You don’t—we don’t have to,” he started, reaching out for Murphy’s side. Murphy flinched at the touch and turned to look at him, dark hair falling into his face.

“I’m not a virgin, Kane.”

Marcus didn’t move his hand, let his thumb brush a soft circle against the skin. “I didn’t think you were.” Murphy had an ugly, homemade-looking tattoo on the pale skin of his ribcage: sock and buskin, the comedy and tragedy masks, presumably a relic from prison. Thalia and Melpomene, and which was this? Marcus wanted to put his mouth on it. He wanted to put his mouth everywhere. “Just, it doesn’t have to be a way.”

Murphy looked irritated. “The hell does that mean—everything has to be a way.”

“Not this,” said Marcus, not making sense even to himself, and crawled up on the bed to press himself against John’s side, the long warm shape of him, until he felt the hard arch of his body start to soften, Murphy melting against him despite himself. “Let me touch you.”

“About fucking time,” John grated, but his eyes looked a little wild, and Marcus kissed him until they were both breathing hard again. From there it was easy to roll him onto his back, and press one of his knees up so Marcus could bend down to lick him open. Murphy had both hands clenched in the pillow, elbows up, back curved, body trembling, and was making those _noises_ again—he was so uninhibitedly _loud_ Marcus both wanted to spend the rest of his life eating him out, but also thought he might be about to come against his own sheets if he couldn’t get inside him soon.

He lifted his head, wiping his chin against the tender hairless skin of inner thigh, distracted because Murphy kept hitting him repeatedly in the shoulder with something, which turned out to be the sample-sized bottle of lubricant that had been under Marcus’s pillow, from the night before, when he’d jerked off feverishly to the memory of John coming in his hands at the party.

“Jesus Christ, would you fucking _take_ this already, I can’t—” and Marcus couldn’t either, so he filled one palm with it, and slicked up his other hand, then slid two fingers into him without warning. Murphy let out an inarticulate shout and clenched down, and Marcus was shocked to feel the warm spatter across one cheek, turned his face in time to catch the next pulse in his mouth, and fumbled another finger into John, to make him come harder, because he was so beautiful like this, and John was still coming when Marcus flipped him onto his stomach and shoved inside, then stopped, dazed, to curl down against him and press his lips to skin, muscles twitching, hanging onto his self-control by its shreds. Murphy tried to move beneath him.

“If you don’t _fuck me,_ I swear I’m going to—”

Marcus wrapped his forearm around Murphy’s throat and jerked him half-upright, back onto his cock, and John yelped once, but then reached behind himself with both hands to clutch at Marcus’s hair, and started to grind back like he couldn’t keep from moving. Marcus couldn’t talk when he was like this, he lost the ability to parse anything but the way John’s hips felt in his hands, the sweat-damp small of his back spanned by Marcus’s thumbs, which were going to leave bruises. He dragged in air, fought not to thrust, just to rock into him rhythmically, holding John’s thighs apart with his own, feeling the taut curves of his ass flex and contract, the heat inside him, desperate for it.

John clawed Marcus’s right hand free from its death grip on his hip and dragged it around to his cock, still hard, still wet from coming, and Marcus started to jerk him in counterpoint to every slow roll forward, sensually at first but then rougher, forgetting to be careful, starting to lose his concentration and just fuck into him. He bit down on the nape of Murphy’s neck and everything was a fine red mist of insanity until John threw his head back and said, hoarsely, “Come in me.”

Marcus froze in place, buried inside him. In the back of his mind, somewhere, he should have realized, John was soft and slick and so unbelievably hot because—

_I don’t have on a condom_. “John, wait.”

“Oh for christ’s sake,” Murphy gasped. He tightened his fists in Marcus’s hair and arched back against him, writhing in his lap. “You were married for, what, like a _century,_ you don’t have anything, would you just—”

“You don’t know that,” said Marcus, and pulled out, which felt like it took years off his life.

“Would you stop being so responsible for once and just fucking bareback me,” said John. Marcus shuddered, and John took advantage of this momentary weakness to turn around in his arms and try to sink back down on him, panting and rocking, hair falling down into his face.

Marcus couldn’t form the word _no_ but he could move, and he’d had experience with pushy bottoms before. He surged forward and caught John’s mouth in his, and lifted him off, struggling and protesting; crawled between his legs and pushed him backward so they were upside-down on the bed, and he had to cradle John’s head in one hand and drag him back up onto the mattress. The fitted sheet came off one corner. _I’ve got you, I’ll take care of you if you shut up and let me, just let me make this good for you_ , he thought, but couldn’t say, and licked along the salt-sweet length of John’s collarbone while he got his fingers back into him and this time stripped his cock without mercy, both hands cramping, resting his forehead against John’s shoulder and sucking in air, unable to get enough oxygen, until he felt John clench around his fingers again and he bit down, hard, enough to leave tooth marks, and John came again with a shattered, distressed wail more like a sob than a sound of pleasure. Marcus understood that sound: his own need to be inside John all the way, to get as close as he could get, was so overpowering he almost felt like throwing up from it, but instead he just fucked his hand up into him, hard, and milked come out of him with the other hand until Murphy was twitching and flinching and cursing, and trying to scoot away beneath him.

“What about you,” he croaked, finally, arm flung up, blinking sweat out of his eyes, “you have to—”

“Yes,” Marcus said, letting go of him to get a hand around himself, and everything melted into some weird kind of smeary sizzling blur which ended with exactly what he’d wanted: one fist wound in Murphy’s hair as he convulsed over him, and came in juddering thick pulses against his mouth and chin and the flushed skin of his throat. John watched him through heavy-lidded eyes, half-open, lips swollen and bruised-looking, something on his face like pain, or shock, or maybe he was just still unsatisfied, because as soon as Marcus stopped moving, about to collapse, John reached for Marcus’s dripping hand and wiped it deliberately on both sides of his face, dragging it down his cheekbones as if he were painting himself for battle. Marcus grabbed him by the temples, both of them somewhere far beyond caring about body fluids, and kissed him, their teeth making contact with a painful _clack_ , until John bit at his lower lip and shoved him away, choking, air whistling in his lungs, legs kicking at Marcus’s until he let go and untangled himself.

They fell apart and lay on their backs, both struggling to breathe. Marcus was too destroyed to reach for him, but he could feel him there, his mind a bright spot of presence, not pulling away, shoulder pressed up against Marcus’s, and then Murphy started to laugh, a cracked astonished sound.

After few minutes the air conditioning kicked on, and it was cold, because he was covered in sweat and lube and come, and probably worse. John flopped onto his side and shoved himself up against Marcus, inelegant, still wheezing for breath. Marcus managed to lift one hand, and it wound up on the inside of John’s thigh, slick-wet and goose-pimpled, but he couldn’t stroke the skin, his hand just lay inert, palm up, fingers curled. John closed his thighs around it and held it there tightly, like Marcus was going to try to take it back. He kept laughing, the whole bed shaking with it, which Marcus hoped was okay, and wasn’t about to transition into crying, because he couldn’t move or speak. Before he lost consciousness completely, he told himself to remember that he probably needed to get a second set of sheets; and he definitely needed a goddamn box of condoms.

  


_X. thought I knew myself so well / all the dolls I had_

It was dark in the apartment when John got up, much later, and went into the bathroom. Marcus woke up when he heard water running; after a while Murphy returned from the living room with his t-shirt, wiping his face with it.

“So I guess this is where the awkwardness usually kicks in,” Murphy said, pulling his shirt over his head, “but maybe we could skip that part and just go with, what are you doing tomorrow night?”

Marcus rolled over and turned on the bedside lamp, then sat up, back muscles protesting. “This really shouldn’t happen again, John.”

“Oh for—don’t get precious with me, not now. You needed that,” said John bluntly, “and you’re going to need it again, and besides it was fucking amazing and we both know it.”

Marcus didn’t bother with a denial. Instead he said, “Have you heard of the campsite rule?”

“Didn’t think you were the outdoorsy type.”

“I’m not,” said Marcus. “It’s a heuristic, a rule of thumb, for—”

“I know what a heuristic is,” Murphy interrupted, looking mulish. He found his boxers on the floor and picked them up, but didn’t put them on.

“—for having an affair with someone much younger. Simply put, you leave them in better shape than you found them.”

“An _affair,”_ said John. Marcus hadn’t wanted to say _relationship._

“So, no unwanted pregnancies, no STDs,” he went on. “No financial damage. No…emotional repercussions.”

Murphy raked a hand through his hair and stared at him. “Thanks in advance for not knocking me up and everything, but how do you think you’re going to control for ‘emotional repercussions.’ That’s the definition of being involved with someone.”

“Well, okay. But you can minimize them.”

“Wow,” said Murphy flatly, “Can’t wait to hear how you’re going to micromanage that. Way to take the jouissance out of everything, professor.” He went out into the hallway and came back with his jeans, which he proceeded to put on in front of Marcus commando, not bothering to turn his back. He wadded up the boxers and put them into his back pocket. “Just, whatever. I don’t care, use whatever _heuristic_ you need, as long as we get to do that again.”

“You’d, you want to?” Marcus said, half-choking on his own saliva, for no reason.

“Oh my fucking god,” John said. He rolled his eyes but came over and pulled Marcus into a quick kiss, fast but hard, mouth half-open. “I want to right now, but I signed up for a satellite tournament tonight, and since you’re so much _older_ and all, I thought you’d appreciate an actual refractory period. Wouldn’t want to leave you in worse shape than when I _found_ you.”

“I don’t think that’s even possible.”

“Neither do I. Give me your phone.”

“It’s in the kitchen,” Marcus said, and trailed out after him, snagging his own pants on the way.

“Just so you know, four zeroes isn’t a very secure password,” said Murphy. He handed Marcus his phone, which was in the middle of calling someone. “Text me what time,” he said, and leaned up to kiss him again. “And you don’t have to thank me, by the way, but you’re welcome.”

Marcus stopped himself before he could repeat all over again that this was a really bad idea, since anyway he’d instinctively wrapped an arm around John’s waist, and the other around his shoulders. Their mouths clung together, the warm scent of John’s breath in his nostrils.

“How dare you kiss me like that when I’m trying to leave,” said Murphy, already breathless; and stayed for another ten minutes while they made out against the refrigerator. _Thank you,_ Marcus thought _, fuck, thank you,_ and concentrated on touching him so carefully that he’d know it without Marcus actually having to say anything out loud.

  


_XI. your apocalypse was fab_

Thus began a very strange period in Marcus’s life, following what had already been a very strange period, and no doubt there was another one already on its way. He wound up suddenly very busy, flung into a paper-spilling spiral of activity, writing both of his articles at once and applying for so many jobs he couldn’t keep track of them all, everywhere, any associate-level opening he could find, Tier One universities and teaching colleges and a few pure research positions—Columbia, Yale, Penn State, MIT, Middlebury, Wesleyan, SOAS, UCL, NYU–Shanghai, the National University of Athens, Tubingen, Rotterdam, Århus, Kyoto, Seoul. He didn’t let himself think about any of it, just wrote cover letter after cover letter, in a way he hadn’t done since his first year out of postdoc.

He didn’t see Murphy at all during the day, maybe because he was asleep, or in class; but almost every night John showed up at his door, usually freshly showered and often with some unexpected offering: food, or alcohol, or a magazine article, or, once, inscrutably, an entire bird’s nest.

“It fell off a cactus when I was running past,” he explained, and Marcus put it carefully up on the top shelf of a bookcase, where it wouldn’t be hurt. It had brightly colored thread and yarn woven all through it, and crushed bits of eggshells in the bottom, robin’s-egg blue.

“You go running?”

“Usually around Tempe Town Lake. This was on A Mountain, though.” John curled up at one end of the sofa, legs drawn up underneath him. He had on shorts and a bright purple crop top. Marcus had to work not to stare at his bared stomach, the half-visible tattoo.

“Why didn’t I know you were a runner?”  


“Probably because I’m not. I just get restless around finals every semester.” Marcus had no idea what to make of any of this, the bird’s nest or the running or the finals or, least of all, really, the crop top, so he brought him a beer and a coaster. John snorted, ignored both, and turned to yank him down with both hands.

“The fuck is your problem, I show up half-naked and you try to make small talk about my hobbies—it’s like our wives are in the other room eating canapés and discussing the local school system. Get down here and blow me, for chrissake.”

That had been a particularly memorable evening. They generally were, and however many times Marcus tried to slow down, or get John to slow down, they still wound up attacking each other, biting and clawing, clothes flying across the room, furniture knocked over, and once, with the mattress having slid all the way onto the floor. But afterwards, once they were no longer slick with sweat and could form words again, John would curl up against him, completely unselfconscious, and they would talk—for hours, sometimes most of the night, and about everything. Marcus learned exactly what kinds of insurance fraud could get a seventeen-year-old put away for five years, why John’s friends had nicknamed him “the cockroach,” and, finally, what a quant was.

“It sounds almost like a mascot,” Marcus had said, propped up on one elbow, rubbing the tension out of John’s neck with the other hand. He crouched over a keyboard too many hours; Marcus knew the job hazard well. “Or those goats they put in with the racehorses, to keep them calm.”

John laughed, muffled by the pillow. “Sure, except a goat who can program in four languages, and do multivariate analysis.”

“And this helps day traders make money?”

“Hand over fist. You can’t be in risk management or securities anymore without one. Almost all trading firms had a quant on the floor, before everything went online.”

“How did you learn all this?” he asked, but that wasn’t what he meant. Murphy seemed to know, though. He rolled over and slotted his fingers between Marcus’s. Then he looked up at him, and their gaze caught and held.

“So, okay. So both my parents are dead.” Marcus had figured as much, but he didn’t say anything, just listened. “Dad when I was twelve. He got shot by a security guard during a pharmacy hold-up. He was a shitty criminal, real small-time stuff, ran with the worst crew. Kind of amazing he even stayed outside long enough to catch a bullet. But he’d taken the night clerk hostage, was trying to get her to unlock the—anyway. Let’s just say he had it coming to him. We never had enough money, and I was kind of a sickly kid. The cops said his pockets were full of asthma inhalers and meds.”

Marcus bit down, didn’t say a word.

“Mom didn’t take it too well. She’d always had a drinking problem, she and Dad fought, but after he died she just—” Murphy took a deep breath, then went on. “I was fourteen when I found her. Benzos, probably. It wasn’t really enough to kill her, but she’d turned onto her back and aspirated.”

Marcus pulled John’s hand up to his lips and held it there, warm skin against his mouth. He closed his eyes, kept listening.  
  
“She didn’t leave a note, but I already knew what it would have said. She’d told me enough times to my face. Anyway, by the time I went into foster care, I was, you know. You can imagine. A total cliché. Factor in Arizona’s amazing school system, and it was even worse than you think. I couldn’t really read, much less write; kept getting held back. Didn’t give a shit about school. It wasn’t hard for them to find me. And I was perfect for them—small, fast. Could get in and out, no one could see me. Never would have been caught, if the whole operation hadn’t folded from the top.”

Marcus felt like he didn’t dare breathe.  
  
“I guess arson would have carried a lighter sentence, even multiple counts, but the online fraud—that crossed state lines. Really, in a weird way, it wound up being for the best. If I’d stayed in Maricopa County, I would have been in Tent City. Instead the federal pen had a library, had computers and online courses and—I was bored, so I taught myself to read. Then, you know. The usual gateway drugs, for angry kids. Vonnegut, Heller, Orwell. All the stuff you hate.”

_I don’t hate it,_ Marcus didn’t say. He let go of John’s hand, reached up to stroke hair back from his forehead.

“The rest you know. That’s it, that’s my fucking sob story.”

Marcus found his voice, finally. “Don’t call it that.”

“What—a sob story? It’s pretty pitiful, you have to admit. Gives you great material for scholarship essays, though.”

Marcus kissed his temple, unable to bear the vulnerability and sheer raw bravado in his eyes. Instead he lay down again, and pulled Murphy back into his arms. John kept talking.

“So what about you—you’re not white.”

Marcus hadn’t been expecting that. “White enough for most people not to notice. But you’re right—my mother was Peruvian. My father’s from Glasgow; I grew up mostly in the Caribbean.”

“Silver spoon?”

“Something like that,” said Marcus. The last survivor of a dead aristocracy, he didn’t say. Nannies, language tutors, tennis and skiing lessons; but also loneliness, confinement, seeing the world through a glaze of wealth as if looking at the stars only through layers and layers of glass.

“So you speak Spanish.”

“It was all I did speak, as a child. But not for years, now.”

“You have a Scots accent sometimes.”

“Mostly when I’m tired,” Marcus admitted. There was a spot below his collarbone where John’s head seemed to fit with uncanny precision. He nestled his face in Murphy’s hair and inhaled.

“Okay, then, quid pro quo: so how does a happily married senior faculty member with a cosmopolitan childhood and a bunch of fancy-pants degrees wind up in Clarke Griffin’s shitty old one-bedroom?”

“We weren’t married.”

“Yeah, you were. How many years?”

Marcus cleared his throat. “Almost twelve.”

“I’d tell you he’s an idiot, but all the magazines say it’s a bad idea to run down your partner’s ex.”

_Partner._ Marcus kissed his temple again. “He’s not, though. He didn’t mean to hurt me. But something changed for him, and he needed—something else. I know if Theo could have done things any differently, he would have. He did the best he could. We all do.”

“That doesn’t make it less shitty, Marcus.”

“No,” he said, reflexively, lips still brushing against John’s skin. “No, I don’t suppose it does.”

  


_XII. for a girl who couldn’t choose between the shower or the bath_

It was a few days before the Chicago conference, and Marcus was up to his eyeballs in a tangled, thorny paragraph of heterophenomenology when he heard the thud of a fist against the door. It didn’t sound like Murphy’s knock, and it wasn’t even noon yet, so he got up slowly, pen behind his ear, still typing as he moved away from the keyboard.

It was Bellamy, eyes dark and arms folded. “Kane.”

Marcus felt a flash of adrenaline, pure fear. “Is everything okay, Octavia—”

“O’s fine. That’s not what this is about. What the fuck, Marcus.”

_What did I do,_ he started to say, but he could see it in Bell’s eyes. He knew exactly what he’d done. He opened the door, hoping that Bellamy would at least come into the apartment to shout at him, instead of doing it in the hallway. Bellamy shoved past him, then turned around before he got to the living room, with a face like thunder.

“Seriously, Kane? _Seriously?_ Do you know how old he is?” Bellamy wasn’t waiting for a reply. “Did you know he spent three years in prison, a lot of it in isolation? Do you know exactly why? Because I bet he didn’t volunteer to tell you. Did you even try to find out, or were you too busy fu—”

Marcus held up a hand. “Bellamy, that’s enough. I get it.”

“Do you, though? It doesn’t seem like it. Because if you did, you wouldn’t still be doing it.”

Marcus wanted to say everything at once— _you don’t know_ , and _it’s not like that_ , and most pathetically of all, _but he likes me_. Instead he moved past Bellamy and sat down on the sofa. This was going to take a while and he didn’t want to stand up the whole time. Bellamy followed, glowering.

“He’s _twenty-seven,_ Kane. You’re what, fifty?”

“Fifty-one.”

“Jesus Christ, what the hell is wrong with you? He’s a _student_. And you _know_ what you’re doing is wrong because you couldn’t tell anyone. You couldn’t even tell me. How long did you think you could keep this a secret? What were you thinking, that you were going to, I don’t know, hold hands at the holiday staff party? Go to his graduation? Meet his _parents?_ Oh, that’s right—they’re _dead.”_

Actually, Marcus had been trying to figure out how to get out of graduation, so he wouldn’t have to sit on the stage in his gown for three hours and then clap politely while Murphy walked.

All the same responses cycled through his head again. He dropped it into his hands, didn’t say anything.

“The worst part is, who knows what you’ve been telling him. Does he think that this is, is _going_ somewhere? Because you can’t do that to him—Marcus, he’s a kid. He’s just a kid.”

“I know,” Marcus said. Bellamy sat down then, heavily, fists still balled in the pockets of his jacket, looking more bewildered than enraged. He was winding down; Marcus knew him well enough to see the underlying sadness, and the worry.

“I just don’t get it. It’s not like you. None of this is like you.”

_My life-partner never walked out on me before_ , Marcus didn’t say. _I never met a beautiful cockroach who actually wanted me._

“How did it even start? Was it—shit, was it _that night?_ At Harper and Monty’s?”

“Yes.”

“Oh my god, I had no idea.”

“Neither did I,” Marcus said, finally, voice cracking. “It wasn’t—I didn’t seduce him, Bell. It—”

“If you say ‘it just happened’ so help me I will fucking punch you.”

“—it wasn’t something I _planned,”_ he stressed. Bellamy stared at him.

“Well I’m no philosopher, but I’m pretty sure your intention counts for shit when you’re doing something you know is wrong.”

“Are you finished?”

“I don’t know—are you?”

_Da mihi castitatem et continentam, sed noli modo_ , Marcus thought, and laughed despite himself. Bellamy tilted his head, that short impatient twist that meant _out with it already_. “Saint Augustine. Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.”

“You can dress it up all you want, it’s still bullshit.”

“I never said it wasn’t.”

Bellamy’s mouth thinned. “You can’t keep doing this, Kane. He’s not that stable—what if he really falls for you? It took Murphy his whole life to get his shit together. The last thing he needs is for you to come barging in and fuck it all up. Do you really want that on your conscience?”

_I would never let anything bad happen to him_ , Marcus wanted to protest, but couldn’t, because he already had. “It’s not—we’re not moving in together. It’s time-delimited, Bellamy. He’s applying for jobs, so am I. One way or the other, we’ve always had an expiration date.”

“Wait, you’re _leaving?”_

“That’s a separate conversation, one I didn’t really want to have yet, but probably. The department’s losing funding; Abby warned me I won’t get promoted. And John’s been interviewing overseas—”

Bellamy cut him off with one upraised hand. “That’s the last time I ever want to hear you call him that.” He stood up. “In fact that’s all I want to hear, period. Just end it, Kane. You’re better than this.”

_I don’t think I am_. But Bellamy had already gone, leaving Marcus sitting there, feeling like he’d just murdered something small and helpless, and buried it, hiding the evidence with his bare hands.

That night when John knocked, Marcus stood at his own front door for a long time, one palm against the wood, and waited, listening, until the knocking stopped, and he heard Murphy going back down the hallway. It wasn’t enough, but maybe it was a start. Maybe Bellamy was right. Maybe the best way to undo the damage was to stop committing more on a nightly basis. Maybe there was a harm-management approach that would minimize risk, and it started with him breaking his habituation to this, the craving he had all the time now for the feeling of John’s skin against his. He could do it. He could be strong enough, especially if that would be better for John Murphy, who hadn’t told him, but didn’t need to, that his mother had blamed him for his father’s death. Who hadn’t explained the allure of arson, but Marcus thought he understood anyway, what it was like to want to watch the world burn. Who hadn’t said that he’d spent time in isolation, except by the way his hands fastened onto Marcus, and wrapped around him, fingers digging in, and couldn’t let go.

  


_XIII. nothing’s been the same_

He and Murphy had never really texted, over the handful of weeks they’d been having frantic sex, but John seemed to be making up for lost time. The texts were evenly spaced, about ten minutes apart, over the next hour.

_Your stupid bicycle’s still there, I know you’re home._

_Did Bellamy come yell at you? He did, didn’t he._

_Look, I didn’t tell him on purpose. He just figured out I was seeing someone, asked the right questions._

_He yelled at me too, if that’s any consolation._

_No one else knows, okay, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’m not exactly taking out an ad in the State Press._

(This last made Marcus smile, in spite of himself; he and Murphy had taken to reading the Press’s daily police blotter out loud to each other in bed, because it was invariably hilarious. _Three armed youths surrounded a male student leaving the library last night at 2:38 am, and stole his lunchbox.)_

_Bellamy won’t tell anyone, either. But you know that about him._

_I don’t know, maybe you have the flu or something. Tell me if you’re not okay._

_I’m just going to keep being obnoxious until you talk to me, but you know that about me, too._

Marcus hunched over and pressed the phone against his face. This wasn’t going to work. He thought for a long time, then typed, thumbs stumbling over the keys:

_Just working on conference paper. Bell will calm down. See you when I get back?_

Maybe, during the five days of his absence, he’d think of a way to cut Murphy loose that would be even remotely bearable. Maybe Murphy would meet someone else, or already had other lovers, though if he did he’d certainly been neglecting them; maybe Emori would come back to him, or—

All the objects in the room seemed to shriek at him, the painted walls grinding at the edges of his mind; the very texture of the air felt sullied and deplorable. Marcus forced himself back to his legal pad, but the ink in his fountain pen had dried, and he sat there for a long time jabbing it at the paper fruitlessly. If there was a way out of this that wasn’t going to hurt, they’d already passed it days ago.

The conference went well, as well as such events could; he’d learned over the years which colleagues to avoid, which panels were most promising, and, most importantly, which committee meetings could be safely skipped in favor of a quiet hour at the conference hotel bar talking with old friends or grading. Sinclair and Nate Miller were both there, too, and he and Jacapo slipped away more than once to regroup from the incessant extroversion and compare gossip. He wound up interviewing with two departments, both at teaching colleges, but still held out more hope for something opening up overseas, or at an R1. He had finished his paper on the airplane, and gave it without incident. Everything was completely normal and ordinary and typical and utterly unremarkable.

He missed John Murphy like burning.

On the first night he lay awake in the dark as the El rattled past the budget hotel every few minutes, lights slanting across the room, and went over what Bellamy had said, focusing on each phrase in turn with all of his supposedly not-insignificant analytic powers. _Do you know exactly why? He’s not that stable. A lot of it in isolation. What if he really falls for you? He’s not that stable. Do you know exactly why?_

This chorus repeated every night, with variations that included laceratingly vivid memories of John’s mouth and hands and ass and the incredulous, breathy sound of his laugh, right after Marcus had just gotten him off really thoroughly. No one over fifty, he thought, should have to wake up with an erection in the middle of the night and be able to come in just a few strokes, biting a fold of the duvet to stifle the yell caught in the back of his throat, hips moving, shoulders curled up off the bed.

After the third night of this, he got up and went downstairs to the basement laundry room, where he could get a paper cup of something not entirely unlike coffee from the vending machine for a dollar, and at least re-experience Bellamy’s harangue under fluorescent lights, instead of being helplessly victimized by his own thoughts in the dark. Sinclair was there with his Surface Pro, set up at an ironing board, working on his presentation. From his face it looked like things weren’t going well. Marcus sat down opposite him on a folding chair and offered him a mini Oreo from the bag.

“It’s two a.m.,” Sinclair informed him, helping himself to several.

“Maybe here,” Marcus said. “In Arizona, it’s only midnight.”

Sinclair blinked. “Wow, you really don’t understand time zones at all, do you.”

“That’s what Siri’s for.”

“You already gave your paper—what are you doing up?”

Marcus tried to take a sip of his instant coffee, which looked like dishwater. “Long story.”

Jacapo spun the laptop around, so he could see the screen; it was the final slide of a presentation, with Sinclair’s Twitter handle and a gif of Bill Nye pointing upward and saying, “Science!” The philosophy of science crowd was far more hip than analytic philosophers were; something about all that Feyerabend, maybe. “I just finished, so I’m a captive audience, as long as you keep giving me junk food.”

Marcus handed him the Oreos and went back to the vending machine, returning with a bag of cool ranch Doritos. “I started seeing someone. And I like them. But I need to stop.”

Sinclair looked unperturbed. “I wondered when you’d tell me.”

“You knew?”

He shrugged. “Not too tough to figure out. Nothing against Theo, but you clearly weren’t getting laid.”

Marcus fought back a laugh. “You’re not wrong.”

“Honestly?” Sinclair went on. “I always saw you getting together with Abby, long-term, but maybe it’s still too soon.”

“It’s always going to be too soon. She’s way too mature for me.”

Jacapo tilted his head, surveying him over the package of Doritos. “So this person’s younger.”

“He is.”

“And that’s the problem?”

“Most of it, yes.”

Sinclair shook his head. “I’m going to say this as someone who’s known you a really long time, Kane: sometimes your head is so far up your ass, I’m surprised you can’t see your own tonsils.”

“Tonsils?”

“I know, I just made that up. So, you’re robbing the cradle. Is it really that serious?”

“What—the relationship, or the age difference?”

“Either. Both.” Sinclair got up and threw away the wrappers, as well as Marcus’s empty cup.

He thought he’d answer the easier question first. “The age difference is...it’s not even really May-December. Maybe more like, June-October. June-November at the outside.” It was still pretty indecorous. _Senex and puer_ , he thought, despondently.

“Is he over twenty?”

Marcus recoiled. “Good god, yes.”

Sinclair sat down again. “Okay then. But you didn’t answer the other question.”

“What does _serious_ mean?”

“You’re not really asking me that.”

“Things aren’t serious the way Theo and I were serious, no. Not, like, real-estate serious. But if you mean serious like, I did something stupid and now I can’t sleep—then yes, it’s serious.”

Jacapo studied him for a second, his amber eyes warm and at the same time dispassionate. He’d taken off his wedding ring a couple of years ago, but Marcus knew he still wasn’t dating. You didn’t recover from losing your wife like that, not for a long time; maybe not ever. “I’ve seen you with Theo, watched the two of you for years, and the whole time you were with him, you never looked the way you have the last few weeks. I think if something’s happening now that’s bringing you life, that’s good. I think you’d be stupid to end it prematurely just because it’s going to end eventually. Think of it this way,” he said, and steepled his fingers. “Truth test. Coherence.”

“Even if…” Marcus began, trying it out.

“Even if it’s going to end, does that mean you should end it now?”

“Even if I end it now, does that mean it’s going to hurt less?”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“And even if it hurts less, does that mean it’s the right thing to do?” Something sore in his chest was starting to ease.

“Necessary, but not sufficient criteria,” said Sinclair, leaning back in his chair. “Furthermore, it’s not _useful_ to believe that it does.”

“You’re such a fucking pragmatist.”

“Harvard Brahmin.”

“Stanford vulgarian.”

“You know you love me,” said Sinclair, and smiled.

  


_XIV. so are you gay / are you blue_

Marcus took an Uber home from Sky Harbor, dumped his suitcase right inside his door, and went straight to Murphy’s apartment. It was nearly ten p.m.; there was no answer, but he’d seen John’s abused Toyota Corolla in the carport. He dug his phone out from the recesses of his laptop bag.

_I owe you an apology. It comes with Thai food._

He couldn’t tell whether there was a light on inside. He knocked again. For no clear reason, he thought of Dogberry: _though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass._ He almost texted this to Murphy, to make him laugh, but then hesitated, unsure as to the reach of John’s autodidacticism, and not wanting to make him feel less-than. And this, he thought, was the problem, but no more so than in any relationship—how to be your full self, without rounding off any of your edges, any of the multifaceted textual references that make a person of words who they are, and yet also not to cause the beloved to feel inadequate. He and Theo had woven around each other for years, staking out separate but adjacent intellectual territories, finding complementarity in their differences, but always careful not to encroach. He'd had to learn workarounds—he’d had the trick for years of stalling when quoting something, pretending to dredge it up from his memory, which was in fact eidetic, because to do anything else would be showing off. He knew to say he’d been to grad school in New England and leave it at that, unless questioned more closely. He’d learned from Thelonious, ever the social diplomat, not to correct mispronunciations, even passively, except in the classroom. But this—this was different. Or he was different; or he wanted to be. He wanted to be himself.

_Please come see me when you can. I’m sorry for being an ass._ And then: _I miss you._

He stood there for a long time, forehead resting against the door, before going back to his own apartment.

The next morning, there was a piece of paper lying just inside his own front door, where it would have naturally come to rest if someone had slid it underneath. He made coffee, then sat down on one of Clarke’s barstools and looked at it for a while before getting up to retrieve it.

The note wasn’t long, and it wasn’t from Murphy. MARCUS, it began, in Octavia’s ruthlessly neat capitals,

> CONGRATULATIONS, ASSHOLE, YOU BROKE MURPHY. HE’S AT ΓΡΛ WITH ME AND RAVEN AND ECHO WHERE WE CAN TAKE CARE OF HIM. BELL TOLD ME. I’M NOT MAD ABOUT YOU GUYS GOING OUT, BUT I AM MAD ABOUT YOU DITCHING HIM LIKE A JACKWAGON, SO I’M ONLY GOING TO SAY THIS ONCE: YOU GET ONE CHANCE TO FIX THIS. MAKE UP YOUR MIND AND CHOOSE. —OCTAVIA

He wondered why she hadn’t just texted him, but Octavia could be, for lack of a better word, somewhat dramatic—all of Bellamy’s uncompromising moral compass with her own singular fire, more Kali than Athene or even Artemis. You were either her enemy or her friend for life. Marcus turned over the piece of graph paper automatically; the back of it was covered in differential equations, in John’s messy, dyslexic-looking scrawl. He stood there staring at it for a long, inert moment, then shoved the note in his pocket and started looking for his wallet and keys.

Marcus had never actually been to Gamma Rho Lambda’s house. Like most academics at Arizona State, he got through entire semesters by pretending the Greek system didn’t exist, but Octavia was a loyalist and ΓΡΛ had offered her a home where he and Theo had failed to do so. The sorority, different from most others by virtue of being inclusive of multicultural and LGBTQ+ students, rented a duplex in the residential neighborhood north of campus. He cycled slowly up Apache and turned onto Mill, noting an ugly dark bank of clouds in the west that looked almost like a haboob, except it was mid-November, and the wrong time of year for dust storms.

Murphy was sitting out front in the courtyard, back against a brick planter filled with cacti, a cigarette in one hand and his phone in the other, reading. He looked a little drawn in the sunlight, but otherwise okay, as far as Marcus could tell; he was wearing a black thermal undershirt beneath a ragged purple ΓΡΛ t-shirt with cut-off sleeves, and what looked like a pair of Octavia’s yoga pants. Marcus paused in the gate, suddenly unsure; he hadn’t thought at all about what he was going to say.

“Anyone ever tell you you’re a creep?”

“Bellamy did,” he said, to his own surprise. He took a step forward. “About a week ago.”

Murphy didn’t look up from his phone, expression frighteningly distant. He took a drag off his cigarette. The air was so heavy and still Marcus could hear the faint crackle of burning paper. “And apparently you agreed with that assessment. So why are you here, if you’re such a degenerate? Not done corrupting the youth? Hoping I’d pour you some hemlock?”

_It’s not like that._ But Murphy knew it. Marcus shook his head. “I fucked up.”

Murphy’s gaze flicked up to him, finally, eyes pale beneath their heavy lids. He didn’t say anything, so Marcus went on, before he lost the nerve.

“I don’t agree with him. Not entirely, anyway. But he said some things that scared me, and more than anything I want you to be okay. More than anything.”

“And you thought a great way to ensure my continued well-being was by vanishing off the face of the earth,” Murphy said, impassive.

“It was only a week,” Marcus objected, and then grimaced. It had felt like infinitely longer.

“Oh, well, if that’s all,” said Murphy, and looked back down at his phone. “Look, I get it, okay. I’m the rebound guy, you’ve rebounded, you’re moving on. A bunch of queer sorority sisters fed me a pint of Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk last night and explained how it works, so we’re good here. Go, be free. Fly like the wind. I release you from your human bonds.” He made the sign of the cross in the air without looking up.

“I don’t, that’s not what I,” Marcus said, and stopped, frustrated. “Come home with me.”

“Are you kidding me,” said John, and this time his head snapped up. “Why, so you can do this a few more times, drag it out all the way to the end of the semester? Honestly, this isn’t even the worst way I’ve been dumped. Ask me about a girl named Ontari sometime. Hell, ask me about Bellamy.”

_Why do kids today all have such strange names_ , Marcus was wondering, when his mind caught up to the rest of the sentence. “What about him?”

“He left that part out of his little diatribe, huh. Yeah, Bellamy. Freshman year. Bit of a dog in the manger, our Mr. Blake. Scared to tell Clarke how he feels but doesn’t want anyone else to have her. The stupid thing is I fell for him, and I let him keep his dirty little secret. But the difference between you and me, Kane, is that I don’t let what other people think fuck up my life anymore.” He put out his cigarette on the ground. From this close, Marcus could see his hand was shaking.

Without quite knowing how he’d gotten there, he was somehow on his knees in the tiny round pea gravel in front of John. He put one hand on his calf; the yoga pants were soft, some kind of crushed velveteen. Murphy flinched, and jerked his leg away. “What the hell do you want, Marcus.”

“Whatever you’ll let me give you,” he said, voice unexpectedly rough.

“Don’t try to be noble,” Murphy warned. “It doesn’t work with me.”

“I’m not,” Marcus said. “I’m not noble. I think that’s been made abundantly clear. But this wasn’t just—what we’re doing, it hasn’t just been—” He couldn’t think how to finish that.

“No, it hasn’t,” John said, carefully, “but it didn’t seem like you’d figured that out yet.”

“What, that we’re—” _not nothing, because we’re actually something,_ his brain finished for him. He put one hand on Murphy’s knee, again, thumb curving around the delicate patella, and this time Murphy didn’t shake it off. “I just didn’t expect it. I didn’t know it could still happen.”

“Surprise,” said John, without inflection, but his eyes were suspiciously bright.

“I’m sorry,” said Marcus, because that was important.

“Dick move,” John said, a little unsteadily.

“Yeah, it was. I am. I’m sorry.”

“You’re an asshole,” said Murphy, and then he was mostly in Marcus’s lap, kissing him, hands fisted in the collar of his jacket, tongue pushing into Marcus’s mouth and it was everything he needed.

“Please come home with me,” Marcus said again, between kisses, chest aching.

“Ugh, whatever, fine,” said Murphy, kissing him again, hard, before letting go and getting to his feet. He held out a hand to Marcus, still sprawled on the gravel. “Let me tell O, and get my stuff. But I think we have to hurry. Because that’s definitely a haboob, and it’s definitely headed our way.”

He was right; the sky in the west had gone from dark gray to a throbbing, ominous indigo. They went inside for John to collect his things, and Marcus endured the delightful phenomenon of having a dozen sorority girls glare at him from different parts of the house. Apparently Murphy was quite the favorite, and he now doubted he’d ever be anything to the current membership of Gamma Rho Lambda other than the sleazebag professor who broke poor John’s heart that one time. He could live with that. Part of the new improved campsite rule, he decided, as Raven and Echo pointedly ignored him, was that John got to choose when to end this. Anything else smacked of rank abandonment, especially when he still didn’t know what Bellamy had meant by _he’s not that stable_.

Marcus cycled back to their apartment complex with Murphy boosted on the back, bike wobbling dangerously. He’d just climbed off and Marcus was shackling the rear wheel to the rack when the wind hit with a bang that made every roof and window rattle. Murphy cursed and ran for the door, shirt pulled up over his face, Marcus right behind him, blinded by a fine spray of dirty rain.

“Jesus fuck,” Murphy said, coughing, as they watched the haboob rake palm fronds down the sidewalk, everything beyond a few feet invisible in the dense wall of sand. “It’s raining balls of mud.”

Marcus had opened his mouth to tell him to stop exaggerating when he looked at John’s bared forearm: there were, in fact, small round splatters of mud against the skin. He rubbed one off, rolling it between his fingers, a little pearl of sticky clay. “Well, we live in hell.”

“Believe me, I grew up here, I already knew that,” John said, “but haboobs are so extra. What next, scorpions fall from the sky? Fiery hail?”

“I think it’s locusts, after this. Then everyone’s firstborn dies,” Marcus said, wiping sand off his face. His eyelashes were grainy; he could feel grit between his teeth.

“Shower,” said Murphy. He pulled at Marcus’s elbow. “Then you can fuck me until my teeth rattle.”

Marcus felt a rush of heat that left him weak, knees watery, his whole body filled with too much blood. “I don’t deserve that,” he said, letting himself be towed toward John’s apartment.

“Probably not,” said John, “but do it anyway.”

  


_XV. thought we both could use a friend to run to_

To everyone’s politely disguised horror, they did go to the faculty-student holiday party together. But they kept PDA to a minimum, mostly out of respect for the various members of Gamma Rho Lambda in attendance, several of whom shot Marcus dirty looks anyway. He smiled at them and drank too much Freixenet. Murphy spent most of the time lurking in a corner, arguing with various economics department members, and Marcus worked at circulating and not watching him. Abby was polite but distant, which Marcus figured he deserved; Sinclair kept beaming at him inebriatedly.  Octavia came up to him near the end and punched him once, hard, in the arm.

“Didn’t think you’d man up,” she said.

“Thanks for giving me the chance,” he said, and meant it.

“Yeah, well. After Bellamy,” O said, and shrugged. At some point, Marcus was going to have to excavate that particular piece of personal history, whether Bell or John liked it or not.

“How’s the double major?”

“Triple. I thought as long as I was adding business to political science, I might as well throw in marketing.”

“I see,” said Marcus, privately appalled by the thought of any of the three. He needed to ask Bell how much all this was costing, because even with the family tuition voucher, it couldn’t be cheap.

“She’ll be Secretary of State before she’s thirty,” said Bellamy, coming to join them. He was wearing a red sweater and looking seasonally flushed. “Come on, we’re picking up Clarke from Sky Harbor.”

Octavia hit Marcus again in the exact same spot, which hurt, but also made his heart feel lighter. He and Theo had reconciled enough via email to pay for her krav maga and fencing coaching for the spring semester, if not enough to be in the same room with one another. Marcus wanted her to be able to take care of herself when she went abroad for her junior year. He had vivid memories of wandering around Rome and Paris, and once, especially stupidly, down Tottenham Court Road at three a.m. If she was going to get up to the same kind of nonsense, which she was, at least she’d be able to break the neck of anyone who tried to fuck with her, should anyone be so foolish.

“Clarke’s coming home for the break?” said John, from somewhere behind him, and Marcus half-turned just as Murphy pushed his head underneath Marcus’s arm and stood there warm against him, one hand resting lightly on his chest, as naturally as if they went to parties as a couple all the time. He was wearing his one white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up. Marcus had to fight not to kiss him, and instead forced himself to leave his arm where it was, and tried to look casual. It didn’t feel casual. It never had. It felt like holding a lit roman candle in your hand and watching it sparkle down to the point where your skin might start to sizzle if you didn’t let go. Marcus wasn’t letting go.

“Just Christmas. She and Abby are going to Vail for New Year’s,” said Bellamy, neutral. Marcus wondered what would happen if O gave Bell an ultimatum similar to the one she’d given him.

“Bring her to the ΓΡΛ party,” Octavia said to Bellamy, as if reading Marcus’s mind. “You should come, too,” she said, to Murphy, who, Marcus noticed, didn’t get punched. “Both of you.”

“Does your sorority party have fruitcake? What about date loaf, or any other food with ‘loaf’ in the name? Will there be caroling? Do you force people to sing?” asked Murphy, sounding suspicious.

O made a face, somehow, without making one. “No, but we’ll have those purple cocktails you like, and probably a lot of weed. Dress code is bikinis. Then on Christmas morning we all go volunteer.”

“Sounds bearable, I guess. Hey, philosopher-king. Let’s get out of here,” said John, elbowing Marcus. His heart did that strange sideways-lurch thing it had been doing pretty much since he’d met Murphy, and they started saying their goodbyes.

It wound up being one of those nights they didn’t quite get through the door before everything went incandescent. Murphy slid one knee in between his and kissed him mindless, until Marcus tasted blood and, surging forward, accidentally knocked over the rickety little semi-circular table in the hall, where fortunately there wasn’t anything except a already cracked ceramic bowl that usually held his keys, a cup full of pens, some scratch paper, and, inevitably, a bunch of junk mail that he never got around to recycling. It all wound up on the floor with them, his knees slipping against sales circulars and slick brochures advertising wifi and bad pizza. He cupped John’s face in his hands as they kissed and then, gradually, without Marcus trying this time, everything slowed down and became hushed and breathless and blurred, still as snowfall before daybreak.

“Oh my god,” John whispered, “why am I so fucking easy for you, it’s stupid,” and Marcus nodded, a little, and took his lower lip in between his teeth. Bit it, tenderly, then licked over the bite mark to soothe it before biting again, a little harder. “Take me to bed.”

“I can do that,” said Marcus, drunk, and then lost time. He found himself crouched on the sheets between John’s naked splayed legs, circling the head of his cock with his tongue, hypnotically, not sure how long he’d been there except that Murphy was gulping for breath and grabbing at his hair, trying to say something. He didn’t stop, couldn’t, forgotten to himself, to the world, everything having constricted down to long slow swipes of his tongue, the salty-bitter slickness of precome, the warmth of skin like satin beneath him, John’s balls drawing up taut and urgent, cupped in his palm.

A particularly savage yank at the crown of his head made him stop, finally, and look up. Murphy shoved up on both hands and met his mouth in mid-air. They fell back to the bed together, legs intertwined. Marcus pulled back to ask him what he wanted, and to take off Murphy’s shirt, open but still hanging from his shoulders. He was touching his bare chest with one hand and undoing the button of a cuff with the other when John said, “Please—Marcus, please,” so he kissed him speechless again; there was a tear track shining on one cheek. Marcus reached up to touch it. What was the symbolic language for this, what was its logical expression? There wasn’t one.

He eased the shirt over Murphy’s shoulders and dropped it onto the floor. “This, oh god, you,” said John, and he couldn’t speak, just leaned his forehead against John’s, settled between his legs, took his hips in both hands and started them rocking against each other, bodies working in silent rhythm.

Sheer pleasure coruscated up his spine, the muscles of his thighs tightening with it. Beneath him, Murphy moaned, spread his legs wider, then pressed his face to the base of Marcus’s throat, exhalations gusting against the skin. Marcus slid his hands behind him to grab his ass so he could thrust better, stroked into the cleft with his fingertips and set off one of those unpredictable chain reactions, the precipitous kind that ended with John wrapping his legs tightly around Marcus’s waist, both of them moving faster. _Some say that the fairest thing upon the dark earth is an army of horsemen, some say a fleet of warships,_ he thought, nonsensically, and drew in air to speak, but John threw his head back, voice harsh. “Shut up, don’t you dare. Don’t even think it.”

Marcus didn’t. He kissed him instead, tongue-fucked into his mouth in time with their thrusts until he needed more, needed to see him torn apart, ripped into pieces, broken down into pleading. He twisted to grope around on the floor for the bottle of lubricant, biting down on Murphy’s hip bone while he shook out enough liquid into his palm, then curled back over him, lifted up to reach between them for his cock, so hard it had to be painful. John let out a hurt-sounding cry when Marcus touched him, blood-hot in his wet hand, and he shut his eyes to concentrate on feeling him: loose skin slick inside the circle of his fingers, the flared sensitive lip that made John shiver and whine. “I want you to fuck me,” Marcus said, voice shaking, not knowing he was going to say it until he heard the words. “I can’t get close enough, I need you _in me_ , John, I _—_ ”

Murphy bit at his throat, rolled them over, and pressed his face to Marcus’s stomach, entwining their fingers briefly. He didn’t understand why and then felt the first cold slippery touch, and bore down into the pressure. John pulled away to scrabble for the box of condoms half-under the bed, and then the lubricant again, so that things were chaotic and sloppy for a minute or two, with stifled swearing, until with a ragged scrape of indrawn breath Murphy was half-inside him, elbows on either side of his ribcage, chest heaving against his. The backs of his thighs were on fire, knees up almost to his armpits, and Marcus drew John’s mouth down, fingers interlaced behind his neck. The pressure cresting in his chest was back again, and he felt his eyes brim.

“I told you, don’t you _fucking say it,”_ said John, and started to move, minute incremental rolls of his hips that made speech impossible.

Part of the reason Marcus usually didn’t like to bottom was that he always came too fast, and this wasn’t going to be an exception. Right away it was too much, John in him and over him and all around him, heat and muscles and the scent of his skin, the blunt thickness of him pushing inside, dragging out only to slide in again, slowly, so slowly. Marcus clung to him, couldn’t keep his eyes from rolling back in his head, could barely keep them open as John moved above him, uncoordinated and shivering, the small of his back wet with sweat, slick under Marcus’s fingers. He felt it all over his body, bursts of spangled ragged bliss at the back of his skull, like he was being turned inside out but John was barely even thrusting, uneven movements somehow deep and pulsing like they were made of molten gold.

“Wait,” he whispered, mouth dry, “stop—John, wait.”

“Like hell I will,” muttered Murphy, and felt between them for Marcus’s cock. “Give it to me.”

“But I’ll come, I don’t—”

“Just fucking give it to me, Marcus, I want you to. Come on, come while I fuck you, come on my cock, come _now—”_

At the first rough touch it started and he couldn’t hold it back, it filled the cradle of his pelvis and tipped over the brim and raced outward, tongues of fire licking down his limbs. He opened his lips over John’s shoulder and bit down, feeling the muscle ripple beneath the skin, filling his mouth so he wouldn’t shout when he came, he was about to come, he was coming, he felt Murphy arch above him and go still, arms locked rigid, then bury his face against Marcus’s neck and cry out, just vowels, no consonants, and he thought _I’m sorry I love you_ , burning up with it, eyes stinging, _I'm sorry I fell in love with you, don’t leave because I need you, fuck, I love you, I’m sorry, I’m sorry I love you—_

  


_XVI. guess it’s clear he’s gone_

In the end, Marcus was halfway down the hall to Murphy’s apartment when he knew. He didn’t know how he knew, so he kept walking, in case he was wrong. But he already knew he wasn’t.

It was Monday morning of Christmas week, and they’d had two arguments the afternoon before, albeit neither particularly heated: one about whether to go to Abby and Clarke’s for dinner, and another about supply-side economics. It turned out they were both too disorganized and worn out from finals week to do anything other than have makeup sex (twice). Afterward Marcus had passed out facedown on the freshly remade bed, boxers around his ankles, and woke up in the dark with Murphy gone, presumably back to his place to shower and change, as was his habit. Marcus got undressed, crawled under the covers, and didn’t wake until almost noon, to find that John had apparently never returned.

He didn’t knock; he couldn’t remember when they’d stopped, but increasingly they seemed to share the same apartment, albeit one with a weird long hallway between bedrooms. Instead he opened the door, which Murphy never locked. The apartment was completely empty—the futon gone, the floor-wide sprawl of laptops and routers and chargers, not a single object remained. _Not again,_ he thought, stunned; and then he stopped thinking. In the middle of the room a heavily photocopied piece of paper, dark gray with toner, lay waiting for him, perfectly centered on the spotless carpet.

Marcus knelt to pick it up and stared at it unseeing, eyes out of focus, until gradually the Greek letters started to resolve into familiar shapes. He recognized _Athens_ , and _boúlomai_ , to want or desire, and then _Agathon_ —of course; it was Alcibiades’s speech from the end of the _Symposium_. As if Murphy’d thought he might miss it, he’d underlined the pertinent passage in blue ink.

> _I’m conscious that if I did not shut my ears against him, and fly as from the voice of the siren, my fate would be like that of others: he would transfix me, and I would grow old sitting at his feet. For I have been bitten by a more than viper’s tooth. I have known in my soul, or in my heart, or in some other part, that worst of pangs, more violent in innocent youth than any serpent’s tooth, the pang of philosophy, which will make a man say or do anything. And you whom I see around me…all of you have had experience of the same madness and passion in your longing after wisdom. Therefore listen and excuse my words and actions now, but let the servants and other profane and unmannered persons close their ears._

The letters blurred again. He sat back on his heels, then let himself fold the rest of the way onto the floor. The beige carpet was sculpted into raised arcs; Murphy or someone else had steam-cleaned it.

His mind split, then, cleanly, into constituent parts, into slices of time and mentation, sensory details happening at him in sequence and but yet also its turns of consciousness occurring so rapidly he experienced the disparate layers as simultaneous, each sudden and present instant of all the emotion he hadn’t felt when Theo left. First quiet rage swept through him, and then raw sexual need, and terror, and howling grief, and shame for his weakness, the ugliness of his base desires; and then, with shocking sweetness, steady wave after wave of gratitude for their time together, sheer simple gladness for having met someone he could find it in himself to love, and for having been loved back.  He knew that, now; he knew, if he’d doubted it, that John loved him. Just as he knew, somewhere in the back of his ability to reason, that later he would have to experience each of these feelings again, severally, in their separate incarnations, until he’d felt all of them completely, and that one after the other each would burn him like pure white fire, unadulterated by the others, agonizing in its single-pointed clarity.

He curled up over the paper, holding it tightly in one fist, concentrating on not holding his breath while he endured. It kept happening. The fractured possibilities of who he’d been, who he was, who he now would never get to be, who he would have to become to survive this, they all crowded up in his throat like vomit. An angry younger self, some former, more contemptuous Marcus Aurelius Kane, would have knocked over furniture, dashed tables clean of objects, broken everything within arm’s reach, with the shattering arrogance of a man who could afford to replace things. But he wasn’t that man anymore, and there was nothing here to destroy. There was nothing here at all.

At some point he realized he could turn over the piece of paper, to see what was on the other side. There were a few short lines, with no salutation or closing.

> _I took a job with Cantor Fitzgerald in Taipei. They asked me to start right away, and I only have thesis hours in the spring. Emori will probably come stay with me, eventually. I never want to lie to you. If I didn’t leave like this, I wouldn’t go. I’m not a coward, but I have to survive, and this is the only way I know how. Please believe me. Don’t come after me. I’m not sorry about anything. Not any of it. I never will be._

That was all that was written. Marcus wiped his face with his sleeve, his upper lip slick with snot and tears. The letter completed it, a frictionless surface. Nothing to grasp onto, nothing to hide behind.

Murphy’s solution was ruthless but brilliant; mathematically admirable, even. He’d found a way to leave that removed any barrier which might have kept Marcus from having to cope. Instead he was left with no choice but to exist in the middle of his entire suffering tripartite self, not segmented off into dualist rationalism. He couldn’t retreat back into being a ghost trapped inside the machine. He couldn’t hate someone who so clearly loved him; he couldn’t blame John Murphy, not for being the exact same John Murphy he loved. And he couldn’t hate or blame himself, because like Socrates, he, too, was loved by his beloved. No arguments, no abandonment. It was a flawless paradox, the perfect clean resolution to the category mistake that had defined Marcus’s entire life. He was left alone, but unbetrayed. Just a body, just a container, but one filled, inescapably, with love.

_Socrates spent the rest of the day in his ordinary fashion; and when the day was done, he went home for the evening and reposed._ Marcus started to laugh, face still wet. Sunlight flooded through the slats of the window blinds, and made angled, narrow diamonds on the floor.

**Author's Note:**

> No analytic philosophers were harmed in the making of this fiction; professional poker players, however, are closer in mirror than they appear. Betts who is the literal best human saved me from self-destructing and I owe her my life, so this is for her.
> 
> Here is a [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2Pjy4FZbzXordkw6A3Lcjf); and a gorgeous rebloggable [photoset](http://aerialiste.tumblr.com/post/180575065866/took-my-leather-off-the-shelf-by-aerialiste) (that Betts made for me). And, if you read this, here is also all my love.


End file.
